


Orbital Period

by Meteor



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Enemies to Friends, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Past Violence, Slow Burn, Survival, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 22:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6926842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meteor/pseuds/Meteor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a mission goes wrong in the worst possible way, Poe finds himself stranded on a hostile planet with an injured Kylo Ren.  When it becomes clear that neither man can get off-world alone, the two are forced into a shaky agreement in order to save their own lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gravity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perlaret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perlaret/gifts).



Poe Dameron hadn't been flying missions for the Resistance for more than a few years, but he'd known Leia Organa for much longer than that and could read her face as easily as the console of his X-Wing. Right now, she looked both irritated and weary, undeniably more human than she ever seemed when giving stirring speeches to the latest recruits or calling out sharp orders before the latest mission. As Poe stepped over the threshold of her room, the general straightened up in her chair and motioned to him with a hand.

"Lock the door, please."

Confused, Poe obeyed, sealing the room off from the rest of the base. That in itself was cause enough for concern; the Resistance had its procedures and ranks but beneath all of that pomp and protocol ran an undercurrent of mutual trust. Secrecy tended to be a soft rule: even if Poe's Black Squadron got sent on some covert scouting run, by the time they returned the entire base would have learned of it. But this kind of shuttering, without even a droid in the room to record the proceedings... Poe guessed it would either be very good or very bad news. He held his tongue as he took a seat across from Leia. A moment later, the general set an object gently on the table - a holocomm, Poe recognized, and he held his breath as she flicked it on.

A static cloud formed above the projector, transparent and blue, then slowly resolved itself into a figure: a man in a set of mismatched and battle-worn armor. It was difficult to tell by the tiny size of the hologram, but Poe thought the man looked anxious: the figure held himself like a coiled spring and kept glancing over his shoulder.

"This message is for General Leia Organa of the Resistance," the hologram barked. "I've got information regarding the location of the First Order's main supply and hangar base, and I want to pass it on to you." Only experience prevented Poe from grinning, and sure enough, he caught himself just in time for the figure to interrupt, "But, y'see, I'm a man on the run myself, and I'm not giving this info out for free when I know people like you will pay for it. So here's what you're going to do if you want the coordinates. You're gonna give this holocomm and one thousand credits to a single pilot and send them out of atmosphere, and then you're gonna cut all communication channels. I talk to the pilot and the pilot alone about where they can pick the info up. If at any time I think you're listening in, me and my info are dust in the wind. You've got seventy-two hours to make your decision." The recording cut out abruptly, and Poe raised his eyes to the general, waiting.

"That arrived for me this morning," she explained. "Apparently this gentleman found one of our informants on Coruscant last night and Wexley swung by to pick it up on the way back from his scouting trip. You and I are the only ones who've seen the contents.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?” Poe asked. Knowing the location of any First Order bases would have been useful, but their main location... that would give the Resistance a serious advantage. The entire movement had been forced to flee D'Qar after the destruction of Starkiller Base, and both sides of the conflict were once again trying to sniff out hints to the other side's locations. With the First Order reeling from the loss of their best weapon and a heavy portion of their forces, crippling their access to ships and supplies might kill their entire cause.

And Poe was eager to see the First Order die.

Leia, meanwhile, pursed her lips in a thoughtful frown, "To be honest, I don’t know. It could very well be a trap. But if that's the case, why ask for only one pilot?"

"You can get a lot of information out of just one pilot," Poe pointed out, before catching himself. Leia's face suddenly softened, and Poe wished he hadn't seen it.

"You can't keep blaming yourself for that, Poe. None of that was your fault." Poe fixed his eyes on the ground, feeling tension building at the base of his skull. Once, he would have felt guilty for succumbing to torture at the hands of the First Order. But since Rey's debriefing about Starkiller and the death of Han Solo and her confrontation in the snow with the man calling himself Kylo Ren, each time Poe's memories dragged him back to those restraints in that shadowy room, Poe could only feel anger. Maybe the torture had worn him down, sure. Maybe he hadn't had enough mental reserves to put up much of a fight. Or maybe, Kylo Ren had known exactly where to burn his mind to break Poe apart.

It had taken three days for him to speak to Leia again after witnessing that debriefing. He would have demanded answers, but by then Poe had dissected the matter himself and had the pieces lined up in an organized row. Learning simply that a creature named Kylo Ren had killed his closest childhood friend - that was simple. Ben Solo had merely been a victim. And over the years, Poe's raw grief had dulled to something he could cope with through memories. He would think of climbing the Force-sensitive tree in front of his parents' home on Yavin IV with Ben. Or he'd think of the night Leia had brought him and Ben along on a trip to Coruscant: they'd stayed in a ridiculously fancy hotel and had fallen asleep in front of a window after spending all evening trying to identify the different ships settling onto the landing pads below. Ben using the Force to make a model X-Wing zoom around Poe's room, after a promise that Poe wouldn't tell anyone. The hug he'd received from a five-year-old Ben at his mother's funeral. The hug he'd given an older Ben the last time he'd seen him in person, before Ben had reluctantly departed to begin his Jedi training.

Ben's loss had been a painful crash to the earth, but Poe had dragged himself out of the wreckage of his grief and patched himself back together and eventually moved on, albeit with a few new scars. But to learn from Rey that Ben had died only in name, that he'd rejected himself and become a killer for the First Order...

Poe could barely process the information now. Had he been younger, he wouldn't have believed it - or his reaction would have been far more rash. Wishful thinking allowed that he'd have stormed off in his mother's old A-wing to confront Ben. Reality reminded him that Ben - _Kylo Ren_  - had killed his own father and ordered the massacre at Tuanul and had broken into his former best friend's mind just to get some information.

It had taken weeks of practice with Rey to learn how to build up mental walls to block those kinds of intrusions, and Poe still felt like Rey had gone easy on him, despite her insistence otherwise. But shutting out Rey's careful attempts to slip into his mind didn't sting. Poe adored Rey, and her quiet strength and curiosity were always welcome - he may have even casually adopted her as the tenacious little sister he'd never had. But Rey wasn't Ben. Poe and Rey had no history of shared secrets or fights or dreams, they hadn't come orbiting back to each other like binary stars each time life put too great a distance between them.

Poe shook his head. He was getting lost in his own recollections, and here in front of him on the general's desk was a possible key to crippling the First Order, their enemy.

"I think it'd be a good idea to look into this," he spoke up, carefully changing the subject. "I could go."

Leia took a deep breath, and Poe could hear the lead-up to a familiar weary sigh, so he cut it off and plunged ahead.

"This isn't about guilt or anything like that. You said you didn't know if it was a trap or not, but the message said I'll get coordinates. I can bring BB-8 along - nothing in the message said anything about droids. BB'll run the info and if it looks too fishy to be worth the risk, I won't even bother. If it's legit, though, we could get some really useful intel. And honestly, if it does end up being a trap somehow, there's no better person to fly out of it. The only reason I got in trouble on Jakku was because I had both feet on the ground."

That drew a short laugh from the general, and she spun the holocom around a few times, letting it rattle on her desk as she considered Poe's offer. Finally, she pushed the device across the desk to him.

"I'm only agreeing to this because I know you're capable. If there's a chance - even the smallest possible chance - that it's a trap, I want you out of there. Got it?" She raised her eyebrows at him, waiting.

"Yes, general."

"And I mean the smallest possible chance. No unnecessary risks."

"Understood, general."

Leia held his gaze for a half-second too long, but then she nodded, satisfied, "Good. I'll meet you in the hangar with the credits in ten minutes. You'd better go find your droid."

 

* * *

 

" _That's_  the planet?" Poe squinted through the windshield of the borrowed X-wing. When BB-8 trilled an affirmative over the comm, he shook his head, "What a gloomy place."

< _It looks like the dustballs under Poe's bed,_ > BB-8 observed, and Poe sighed. As he swooped in towards his destination, his commlink crackled to life, sounding as filthy as the planet's atmosphere looked.

“You’re- early, Mi- Resistance-”

Poe frowned and checked the instrument panel, “BB, see if you can clean up the connection a little.” The droid beeped and got to work, but the man on the other end of the line laughed, which turned halting and hacking in the static.

“No use- it’s -e atmosphere- bad f- communications. You’ll nee- follow me d-”

“Roger that,” Poe shrugged, and pivoted the craft in space. Below, he could see the faint glow of engines in the planet's upper atmosphere, along with the silhouette of an old YT-class light freighter, familiar and disc-like.

The information broker refused to give Poe his name, but he did provide him with coordinates that led to a star system so tiny and forgettable, a system that - according to the broker - didn't have a name either. Poe’s agreement with the broker prevented him from opening any communication lines to search for information, but if he had to guess, the star would be designated something like "GT342", and the dusty-looking world he was descending towards would be "GT342-A". If Poe had been forced to give the place a proper name himself, it wouldn't have been a kind one.

“It’s not a nice place to live,” the broker had informed him in the initial transmission, "but it's a good place to meet for a deal like this. You’ll see what I mean when you arrive - oh, and bring a sealed helmet and breathing system with filters.”

The broker’s craft hovered just above the foggy atmosphere, and as Poe drew closer, it swerved slowly and began to dive. Poe had to stay close on the other pilot’s tail; the atmosphere proved to be unusually thick and he lost visual on the other ship several times. BB-8 took a few readings of the dirty clouds and whirred intrigue, but Poe focused on flying and soon enough the dense layer of particulates and fog gave way to a slightly clearer layer of atmosphere, just in time for him to pull his X-wing horizontal and put it gently down. Poe checked the breathing tube's connection to his helmet, armed the blaster at his side, and hopped out.

The planet's surface was hot and dim, and could have passed for tropical save for the complete absence of anything resembling life. The bright rays of the nearby star filtered just enough through the atmosphere to illuminate everything in a gray and washed-out light. Here and there, deep fissures rent the flat earth, and tendrils of steam wafted up from them before merging into the all-consuming fog. Poe carefully dodged these as he headed towards his contact, BB-8 rolling behind at his heels.

Behind where the broker had landed his ship, a series of steep cliffs jutted irregularly up from the barren ground. In one of the fissures gouged into the side of the jagged face, Poe spied a glimmer of metal, and as he walked closer, the glimmer resolved itself into a sturdy door, sunk deep into the rock itself and set a step up from the planet's dusty surface. The broker, in his own protective helmet, walked up to meet Poe just outside the shadow cast by the crooked cliffs. Poe disliked that he couldn't see the man's face, but shrugged his discomfort off. Any man who had information on the First Order had good reason to protect his identity.

“Nice place,” Poe remarked.

“It’s out of the way, if that’s what you mean,” the other man replied. “And the atmosphere blocks communications, among other things. Have you got the credits?”

“I do,” Poe confirmed, “but I’m not handing anything over until I get this information you spoke about.”

“Of course, of course.” The broker nodded, beckoning Poe towards the high rock outcroppings, “Let’s discuss this somewhere with a proper atmosphere.”

“There?” Poe gestured towards the metal door, and his contact gave a nod.

“Suffice it to say it’s safe from this," the broker gestured towards the surrounding planet. “I told you this place wasn’t nice, so let’s leave it at that. I’d rather not have a discussion about fees through respirators.”

“Fees?” Poe questioned, and from the rise and fall of the broker's shoulders, he could tell he was getting on his nerves; it was a gesture he'd become intimately familiar with for a variety of reasons. But he decided to press his luck regardless, “I thought we agreed on one thousand credits.”

“We did,” the broker confirmed, "but for information as valuable as this, I think I can get a lot more.”

To say that Poe felt frightened wasn’t correct. In fact, Leia had even expected this: she’d arrived as he was configuring his borrowed X-wing with a total of five thousand credits in tow, announcing that she’d been involved in deals like this before, but what Poe was getting was the extent of the finances the Resistance could spare. Poe had hoped, however, that he’d been dealing with a straightforward person from the get-go. Served him right for being an optimist, he supposed.

“Are you coming or not?” the broker snapped. “I don’t want to be here when nightfall hits-“

Poe’s X-wing exploded in a vivid orange fireball and a millisecond later the shockwave reached the cliffs, staggering Poe and the broker backwards. Stunned, Poe spun around fully and watched as the fireball rose from his ship and continued to grow, as the flames shimmered from orange to a brilliant poisonous blue and hung in the air, a glowing nebula.   _The atmosphere_ , Poe remembered faintly, _there's something wrong with the atmosphere-_

“No! No, kriffing hell-“ The broker found his voice first, “It’s too damn early-“

“Early?” Poe echoed, staring at the smoking remains of his ship as the blue inferno flickered out, dying flame by flame. Leia’s words of warning echoed in his ears.

“I told him the atmosphere here was _volatile_ , no kriffing blasters or-“

“Told _who_?” Poe demanded, rounding on the broker, who took a defensive step back, palms out.

“Look, just get inside the shelter for now, passcode’s 4-6-1-1, just wait-“

A dark shape was descending through the fog, and as it drew closer to the planet’s surface it resolved into the sharp lines of an old Lambda-class shuttle, which folded its wings up and settled down some distance from charred remains of Poe’s ship, sending up a puff of dust. The entry ramp lowered and now it was Poe who took a step back, raising a hand to his helmet and clinging to a breathing tube because his lungs had abruptly failed him.

Kylo Ren strode out of the ship, raising a hand in one smooth motion, and the broker careened towards him, dragged by an invisible hook in his throat. Struggling and spitting, he nearly fell to his knees before managing to compose himself.

“You... you’re not supposed to be here yet...ten hours...” the broker choked out.

Poe found his breath and forced himself to look away from the two figures in front of him. He hadn't come prepared for this and he no longer had a ship and the only weapon on his person had proven ineffective the last time he'd used it against Kylo Ren. He forced himself to take a deep breath as BB-8 jostled up against his legs, hiding.

“On the contrary, I think I came here at just the right time,” Kylo Ren replied, his voice a mechanical growl as he lowered his hand. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have witnessed your little grift in action.”

“Grift?” The broker’s voice went a pitch too high. He'd been nothing but calm when Poe had spoken to him, but Poe couldn't blame the other man. Kylo Ren had that effect on people, and with that understanding, Poe felt his fear begin to subside, replaced instead by anger. In his mind, Rey's tutelage kicked in and he began to build his walls.

“Yes. You’re playing the role of a double agent," Kylo Ren explained. "You can sell information to both sides of a conflict and make double the profit. It might not even matter if what you're selling is valid. As long as neither side figures the ploy out, you can get all the credits you need and be long gone before anyone figures out they’ve been tricked.”

“That- that wasn’t-“ the broker protested.

“Don’t bother,” Poe heard himself interrupt. “He knows a lot of smuggling tricks. Learned from the best, right?”

Kylo Ren spun around and Poe had his blaster drawn so quickly he swore he’d heard the harness rip.

“Dameron. I didn’t recognize you under that helmet.”

“Likewise,” Poe said through teeth clenched in a mockery of a smile. _You just had to open your mouth, Poe. You had to pour fuel on the fire._  “Then again,” he went on, “I had it on good authority that you’d been killed over a decade ago.”

That seemed to give Kylo Ren pause, and in that silence, the broker found his spine.

“Put your blaster away!” he hissed at Poe. “The atmosphere isn’t _stable_ , you’re gonna get us all killed! You saw what happened to your ship!”

Poe ignored the order and kept his arm raised, “Buddy, the atmosphere is the least of your problems right now.” Behind the visor of his helmet, behind the fury currently turning the corners of his vision red, Poe’s thoughts were racing. He needed a way to get off the planet. He needed a way to get away from Kylo Ren. Just being nearby felt like slowly drowning; he had to react or he felt certain the man who had been his oldest friend might just kill him. Half-formed plans and dangerous ideas spun in a maelstrom with nightmares of someone tearing through his memories and leaving a trail of agony behind.

Kylo Ren, meanwhile, turned his faceless gaze from Poe back to the broker.

“You.”

The broker stood his ground.

“The First Order is prepared to pay 10,000 credits for information regarding the Resistance’s main base - _if_ the information you have is in fact correct.”

Poe tried to read the broker’s body language, but the armor-clad man gave little away.

“If not,” Kylo Ren continued, “you will die, and we will get the information we need from the pilot-”

“The pilot disagrees,” Poe cut in, blaster still raised. His heart was throwing itself desperately against his ribs, but he’d come too far to back down at this point. “The Resistance is prepared to to offer 20,000 credits for information pertaining to the First Order’s main supply route.” Kylo Ren lowered his head, angry, snake-like. Poe wondered if he was glowering under that mask.

“You’re bluffing.”

“Are you sure?” Poe tapped the side of his head with his free hand, “I know you’re not digging around in my head right now, and there are a lot of generous, wealthy individuals who are pretty happy about this huge weapon we destroyed not so long ago-“

That was when the earthquake began. Startled, Poe took a knee, blaster still trained on Kylo Ren as above them all, the gray sky began to fade to an ugly purple, the color of a bruise.

“No, no, no-“ The broker took a step back, and out of the corner of his eyes Poe saw him glance at the metal door. "Kriff the both of you," he snapped, and broke into a run. He got three paces away before Kylo snared him with the Force, flinging him away from his destination with such violence that he slammed against one of the upraised wings of the First Order shuttle. As Kylo turned to observe the unfortunate man, Poe heard BB-8 chirp a rapid warning in binary. He managed to parse < _nightfall_ > and < _temperature_ > from the violent beeping before he chanced a look over his shoulder. His eyes went wide.

Massive jagged spires, inverted frozen lightning, edged up into the sky through the distant fog, and a creeping carpet of frost was inching closer to them, pooling out across the ground as the air and atmosphere began to chill. The steam drifting up from the fissures in the surface faded and disappeared and water came surging up instead, bubbling and spitting up in geysers before the darkening air overtook it and froze the water solid. The ice fractured and broke and refroze to other shards as it pushed further up into the air, and Poe realized that as the planet continued to rotate away from the sun, the creeping edge of darkness drew closer, bringing with it this quickly growing snarl of ice. The broker's urgency to be out of here by nightfall became rapidly clearer.

"C'mon, BB," Poe muttered, standing back up. "We need to get out of here-"

"Where do you think you're going?" Kylo Ren stood his ground some distance away, ignoring the broker slowly climbing back to his feet behind him.

"If you haven't noticed, the planet's freezing over," Poe snapped, pointing at the slowly advancing forest of ice with his free hand. "I'm leaving."

"In what?"

"I'm working on that part," Poe muttered.

"And I still haven't gotten the information I was promised," Kylo Ren warned, raising a hand.

The mental onslaught hit him like a punch but this time Poe was prepared: his barricades had been raised and reinforced throughout by cold anger at what his former best friend had become, what his former best friend had _done_. Before Kylo Ren had a chance to tear any of those walls down, Poe had to get away, and he aimed his blaster and fired as Kylo Ren's hand shot to the lightsaber hilt on his belt.

The bolt hit the burning red blade and angled, deflecting straight into the landing gear of Kylo Ren's shuttle, and Poe saw sparks spitting from a severed cable a moment before the air rent with a _crack_  and he got knocked off his feet, slamming into the frost-covered ground with a groan. The shuttle had gone up like kindling and the fireball now rose lazily into the air, but Poe had remembered seeing _red_  light, not orange-

A dark shockwave slammed into his mind and Poe grabbed his head; his senses had gone dead and he couldn't see or feel anything but fear, anger, shock, a horrible parasitic darkness scrabbling in the void with skeletal hands and empty eyes to take hold of something, somewhere-

And then, as suddenly as it had hit, the feeling vanished, replaced by the blue glow of leftover flames hanging in the air, the cracking of heavy ice, and someone's muffled screaming.

BB-8 bumped urgently against Poe's side, chirping < _Poe is hurt, Poe is hurt_ > over and over, and Poe waved the droid off.

"It's fine, BB, I'm fine, let's... let's get..."

Poe pushed his aching self up onto his elbows, but he stilled when he found the source of the screaming.

Kylo Ren had been knocked to the ground by the force of the explosion as well. His burning lightsaber had gone missing - as had his right hand. His arm ended in a smoking ruin of charred fabric and flesh just below his right elbow, and despite all the pain the other man had put him through, Poe still felt horror drain the blood from his face. Slowly, he pulled himself to his feet. The shuttle had been reduced to blackened scraps. There was no sign of the broker. The sky grew ceaselessly darker and the massive icy knives grew closer. When Poe glanced back to the wreckage spread out before him, Kylo Ren had fallen silent.

"...c-c'mon, BB." Poe set off at a limping jog towards the metal door. He couldn't think; his mind had slammed itself into survival mode. He'd experienced something similar in dogfights before, where you moved on muscle memory and instinct, not on any rational plan. All Poe could understand was this: if he intended to get off the planet, he had to first survive the night. Punching the broker's code into the panel on the door, he let out a harsh sigh of relief as it slid open, revealing a dusty hallway leading back into what looked like a small room. Poe took the time to haul BB-8 up over the rocky stair before slamming the door closed behind him and engaging the security lock.

Safe at last for now, Poe sank against the wall of the hallway. He reached a hand out and BB-8 rolled over, bumping gently against his shins.

"Think I can take my helmet off yet?"

The droid murmured quietly, testing the air, then beeped out a < _Yes._ >

"This place must have an air scrubber," Poe rationalized, tugging off the heavy gear with another sigh. "Hopefully things don't explode as easily here either."

< _Exploding air is outside,_ > BB-8 confirmed, twisting his head around.

Poe gave the droid a pat, "Why don't you go have a look around. I'm just going to rest for a moment." BB-8 chirped and rolled off down the entryway to disappear around a corner, and Poe set his helmet on the ground and buried his face in his hands. He focused on taking slow, deep breaths. Now that the adrenaline in his system had started to fade, he felt exhausted. He needed to... he needed to...

Poe's heart jumped into his throat as a frantic pounding erupted from behind the sealed door. He sat bolt upright and slid his helmet away, his hand once again going to his blaster.

“Let me inside!” The low metallic growl caused by his voice modulator did nothing to hide the anxiety in Kylo Ren's orders. “Open the door!”

“No,” Poe answered, instantly disappointed by how shaky his own voice sounded. He’d activated the door lock and flung up his mental walls but despite being safe from the fast freezing planet, he couldn’t help feeling trapped. But the lock held, and no cold fingers came scratching at his thoughts: the danger remained on the other side of what Poe was hoping was a very solid door.

“You’ll never get off this planet alive!” Kylo Ren shouted back.

“Seems I’ve got a better shot at that than you do right now,” Poe retaliated, his hands curling into fists. _He can’t reach you in here,_  he told himself. _He’s hurt. He’s trapped outside. All you have to do is wait._

_He isn't Ben._

“Is that so?” the other man asked, and there it was again, that hint of breathless fear in his voice. “Going to build a beacon?" The atmosphere blocked communications, Poe remembered. He couldn't put out a call for help or rescue.

"You need to fly back above the atmosphere. Have you got a working ship?” Kylo Ren gasped his words out without pausing for breath, but Poe mentally arrived at the conclusion at the same time. His X-wing and the shuttle had been destroyed. But there had been a third ship.

"The broker's ship is working," Poe thought aloud, and Kylo Ren laughed, harsh and mocking, the edges of his voice colored by pain.

"I can see it from here," he said. "There's ice cutting up through it."

That caused Poe's stomach to drop, and he mentally punched himself. If he'd run for the ship instead of the door, he might have been able to get off world before the ice had overtaken the ship. Instead, he'd trapped himself. But the cause wasn't totally lost, not yet.

"Seams can be welded together," he shot back. "Parts can be fixed, I can-"

“No, you can’t,” Kylo Ren finished. “How are you going to weld in this atmosphere? Will you seal the ship away in... what?"

Inwardly, Poe swore. The ship couldn't be repaired by normal means, not in this atmosphere with the little resources he had. The hope that had been struggling to stay lit in his chest began to flicker and die.

To Poe’s surprise, the pounding cut off, and a moment later he heard instead the soft metal whisper of Kylo Ren sliding to the ground against the other side of the door.

“I can help you.”

“I don’t want your help,” Poe heard himself reply automatically. _It's a trick. It's a trap._

“You _need_  my help,” Kylo Ren rasped. Behind his words, Poe heard the quiet crunch of rocks and sand, slowly and ceaselessly growing louder. Nightfall was creeping closer to the door, and the ice came with it, breaking the ground apart.

“There are pieces hanging off by threads," Kylo Ren added. "You and your droid can’t put something that big back together without a proper hangar. But I can help. I can hold them up. I can shut out the dangerous air.”

He was right, Poe realized in horror, his heartbeat rushing in his ears. Without winches or further help from droids, there’d be no fixing the ship back together to any sort of usefulness. Alone, he and BB-8 couldn't accomplish it: they could both lift and hammer and cut, but if the ship had truly been broken up as badly as Kylo Ren claimed, they would need someone to hold things in place. They would need someone to create temporary shields to block out the volatile atmosphere - something, Poe realized, that a strong Jedi could do. And back on Jakku, Poe had witnessed Kylo Ren stop a blaster bolt in midair. That had to have taken an absurd amount of strength and control.

"Why don't you just fix the ship yourself, then?" Poe challenged, still wary. "What's in it for you?"

Kylo Ren didn't answer immediately.

"What's stopping you from just breaking apart this ice with your mind and putting the kriffing thing back together yourself?" Poe demanded again.

"I need a pilot."

Poe had to stop himself from flinging his blaster at the wall.

"You never learned how to fly?! That's your excuse?!"

"That's your guarantee that I'm not going to kill you," Kylo Ren replied, "so let me in!"

Outside, the rumble of the approaching ice grew steadily louder. Poe stared at the door, breathing harshly. He had trusted Ben once. He didn't trust Kylo Ren. Maybe he could fix the broker's ship alone. Maybe the damage wasn't as bad as Kylo Ren claimed. But if he let the other man die, if he ended up genuinely needing his help...

“Please.” Kylo Ren’s voice was almost a whisper now, drowned out by the approaching thunder of the ice tearing up through the planet’s surface.

Poe took a deep breath, a thundercloud of tension building in his skull. The lingering embers of the interrogation flickered up, searing the edges of his memories, and he forced them aside. After his time on the _Finalizer_  he’d mentally vowed that the next time he found himself in a room together with Kylo Ren, he’d put a blaster bolt through him properly. But that had been before he'd learned Kylo Ren's real name, before he found himself trapped on this hell of a planet facing down a variety of deaths, most of them certain.

The door lock beeped a warning as he disabled it, and when the door slid open Poe could see the ice twenty paces away, stabbing up through the ground, massive and crooked frozen daggers. He seized Kylo Ren by the back of his robes and flung him inside before slamming the door shut. The lock activated and a few seconds later Poe heard the crack and scream of ice fighting against the metal. Poe flung a hand up to cover an ear and used his other hand to draw his blaster and aim it at Kylo Ren. The other man had brought both hands to his ears without recalling he only had one hand left and had hit himself in the helmet with his maimed right arm. He now sat hunched over in obvious agony. Poe glanced aside and saw BB-8 fiddling with a port in what looked like a control console; a low-energy forcefield sprang up in front of the door and the room began to warm up.

Once the screeching and crackling of the ice outside had faded, Poe spoke.

“You stay the hell out of my way unless I ask for your help, and you stay the hell out of my head _regardless_. You don’t touch BB-8.”

Kylo Ren nodded wordlessly; his injured arm trembled, curled tightly against his chest. Poe thought he looked pitiful. _Not so frightening anymore, are you?_  he wanted to ask.

“I’ll bandage your arm,” Poe went on, “and make sure you stay alive and in return, you help me fix the ship. We can talk about what to do once we get off this dung-heap later. Have we got a deal?”

“Deal,” Kylo Ren replied through gritted teeth. The trembling had spread from his arm to overtake the rest of his body.

“The second you try anything funny, you can spend the night outside.” Poe swallowed back the venom in his voice before speaking up again, “Understood?”

“Understood,” Kylo Ren managed, before passing out and slumping to the floor.

Poe stared down at the crumpled form for a moment before stowing his blaster. "Okay," he spoke to himself, "okay. Let's see if this place has a medkit or something."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I honestly planned on this being much shorter, and then I took that plan, put it on a motorcycle, and ramped it into the sun.


	2. Celestial Mechanics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Poe Dameron knows starships, Kylo Ren can use the Force, and BB-8 has a welding torch. Together, they can hopefully manage to repair a single freighter.

_The First Day_

 

When Poe woke up the next morning after a fitful sleep on top of some storage crates, the first thing he did was to slide on his helmet and check outside. The dim sunshine had returned, and its heat had crumbled the ice into a carpet of glittering shards. The air was once again full of steam and fog. Satisfied, Poe moved back inside to check on Kylo Ren.

The shelter turned out to be what looked like a smuggler's safe-house (Poe had started to suspect that was the true job of the now-dead broker). A short entrance hallway led into a cramped control hub with a console for monitoring the shelter's resources. Two doors led off from the control room: one to a cramped and sparsely-furnished living quarters and one to a slightly larger and barer storage vault. Poe had dragged Kylo Ren onto the carpet in the quarters and, with the medkit BB-8 had found, had done what he could with Kylo Ren's arm. Thinking about the injury still turned Poe's stomach, but in the explosion, Kylo Ren's lightsaber had done him one final favor: the whole mess had been cauterized, and he'd lost very little blood.

Kylo Ren still lay flat on his back, and Poe wondered if he had even moved during the night. While he hadn't removed Kylo Ren's mask, one glance at the rise and fall of his chest confirmed that he was still alive.

Rolling up behind Poe, BB-8 glanced up at him before deploying his arc welder with a crack of electricity.

< _I shall wake him up,_ > the droid declared, advancing towards the man on the ground.

"Woah there, buddy," Poe bent down and beckoned the droid back. "You're gonna need that later, I'd save your energy." He thought about waking the man up himself, but shook his head. He could probably get started on the ship alone, and the less time he had to spend around Kylo Ren, the better. Adjusting his helmet, Poe turned his back to the sleeping man and headed outside to find the broker's ship.

The broker's old YT light freighter rested nose to the ground, tipped off its three remaining struts. Vicious stab wounds cut up through its hull in a variety of places. The cockpit dangled by a few wires, dangerously close to separating from the body of the ship entirely, and one of the engine intakes had been split in half.

Poe fought back dismay. Kylo Ren hadn't been lying about the condition of the ship, at least. He started to give the ship a full walk-around, making notes of what had to be fixed, what he probably could fix, and what he could ignore. By the time he reached the front of the freighter, Kylo Ren had arrived on the scene, hunched vulture-like over his injured arm. Poe stopped next to the ship and made no attempt to move any closer.

"Hey."

Kylo Ren turned his faceless mask towards Poe, waiting.

"Can you put it upright?"

"Why do you need it upright?"

Poe bit back a sigh, "It'll be easier to assess the damage from the inside. I'll have to fix it inside-out - no point in mending the hull alone if there are cut wires."

After a moment of silent regard, Kylo Ren stretched his left hand out toward the ship, and Poe jogged away. Silence, then a creaking and groaning of metal, and the ship tilted up before rebalancing onto its struts with a crunch and a cloud of dust. Kylo Ren let his hand drop back to his side, and then gave an alarming sway backwards and hit the ground hard, sending up a smaller cloud of dust.

"Hey - HEY!" Poe took a few steps over before stopping short, "I said put it upright, not kill yourself!"

Kylo Ren huffed through his voice modulator before pulling himself slowly up from the ground. After shaking the dust off his black robes, he turned and walked slowly off into the fog.

Inside his helmet, Poe scowled.

"C'mon, BB," he muttered to the ever-nearby droid. "Let's see how long this is going to take us."

The damage became more obvious inside the ship. Poe forced himself to take deep breaths as the number of systems that needed repair began to creep higher and higher. They could live without the hyperdrive or the artificial gravity, but steering and life support and shields were necessary.

"Why couldn't we have gotten stuck somewhere with a kriffing garage, huh?" he muttered to BB-8 as he sank back against one of the walls to rest.

< _Poe is not lucky,_ > the droid beeped sympathetically, before trilling a warning and rolling in front of Poe protectively as metal footsteps sounded on the entry ramp. Kylo Ren's masked head appeared just above the lip of the floor. Poe fought the urge to reach for his blaster.

"Have you finished yet?" he asked.

"I took a look around," Poe explained, wary. "It's going to take some time to fix without the proper parts or tools."

"So you haven't finished repairing the ship?" Kylo Ren asked. He stalked up the rest of the ramp into the ship, looking too big for the cramped interior.

Poe felt his heart start to race and inwardly swore. _Don't be afraid of him,_ he reminded himself. _Don't forget that you're his ticket off this joint._ "No," he explained, "I haven't finished repairing the ship because I haven't started repairing the ship yet. There's a lot to repair."

"How long is it going to take you?" the other man prompted.

"I don't know, alright?" Poe snapped, standing to his feet. "I know you're used to getting things right away but you're going to have to wait."

Kylo Ren looked taken aback at that, and that caught Poe off-guard. It hadn't been the reaction he'd been expecting.

"What are we supposed to do when night falls again, then?" Kylo Ren demanded. "The ship will just get torn to pieces again."

"I thought you'd be able to put up a shield or something," Poe admitted. "Can't Jedi do that?"

"I'm _not_  a Jedi," Kylo Ren retorted, and suddenly the air inside Poe's helmet felt heavy, uncomfortably thick. Poe's heartbeat revved back up into panic and he took a few frantic breaths.

"We agreed no Force tricks!" he reminded the other man angrily, his hand now steady on the holt of this blaster.

"We agreed I'd stay out of your head," Kylo Ren replied, putting on an air of confusion. "I was lucid enough to remember _that_  much." As he gulped for air, inside his mind, Poe felt something snap. He stormed over to the other man, hands balled into fists.

"I don't know what kind of people work for you normally but if you think I'm going to ignore you tormenting me because of _semantics_ , then you can find another ride home. You can burn all the bridges you want, _Ben_ , but you ought to remember what happens to burning things on this planet." Poe took a deep breath, his own blood rushing hard in his ears. He usually never lost his temper like that and he'd even started to regret it a little already. Perhaps he'd gone too far.

"Are you _threatening_ me?" Kylo Ren demanded. Poe drew himself up to his full height - still a good deal shorter than the other man.

"Yeah, I guess I am," he answered. "I'm working with you because I have to, but the second you try to use me, I'll blow this scrap heap to pieces." Poe heard the other man heave a short sigh, and he turned and stalked back towards the entry ramp.

"Then _tell_  me your plans next time, don't just _assume_  I'm following along," Kylo Ren snapped. "And I _wasn't_ using the Force, for the record. If you can't breathe properly, you need to get your helmet checked." He stormed out of the ship back into the weak sunlight, and Poe raised a hand to the breathing tubes hanging from his helmet. For some reason, the air seemed to have cleared.

By midday, Poe had finished splicing a thick bundle of severed wires back together, and his head had begun to ache. He checked BB-8's work on the pipe he was trying to straighten out, then cheered the droid on before descending from the ship for a break. Half-hidden by fog in the distance, Kylo Ren appeared to be picking through the wreckage of his shuttle, searching. Poe let him be and headed to the shelter instead.

In the chaos of the mission going wrong, Poe hadn't thought to eat or drink anything, and that now became his most urgent concern. More worrying still, the shelter clearly had been constructed as a stopover point, a temporary safe house for smugglers and cargo. It wouldn't be stocked for long-term use, and Poe had no idea how long his unintentional visit would be. A quick search of the rooms solidified his concerns: Poe found a pile of dry rations in a cupboard under the bed of the living quarters and a working sink set into the wall that dispensed clean water, but that was it for nourishment. He only allowed himself a bite of the rations and a few sips of water, making a mental reminder to have BB-8 check the tank levels later.

Poe passed the rest of the day in silent work, checking over his shoulder every so often as he sat in the mangled hull of the ship and pieced together mainlines and circuits with a roll of electrical tape from a maintenance kit. It was a slipshod job - Poe had never worked on this kind of craft before, and his specialty was flying starships, not fixing them - but thankfully most of the wires had been color-coded. Eventually, BB-8 interrupted him.

< _Night is coming back,_ > the droid observed. < _The air temperature is cooling._ > Through the cockpit windshield, the sky had started going dark. Poe hopped to his feed and jogged out of the ship.

"Hey-"

Kylo Ren had vanished from the ruins in the distance. Poe couldn't see him anywhere as he scanned the dim horizon.

"What?"

Poe jumped and spun around, trying and failing to hide his surprise. Kylo Ren had taken shelter directly underneath the ship, apparently.

"There you are," he muttered. "I need you to put some kind of shield around the ship."

"The plan you mentioned to me earlier," Kylo Ren observed, and Poe caught the sardonic tone of his voice despite his mask.

"It's the last time it'll happen here," he assured the other, his tone grim. "You can give me hell about it later if you want, but I don't want to lose a day's work. Unless... you can move the ship?"

"The _entire_ ship?" Kylo Ren shook his head, "That's not possible, even for me."

"It'll have to be a shield, then," Poe reasoned. "Can you do it?"

"Of course I can do it. Just stay out of my way." As the ice began to advance towards them once more, Poe got BB-8 back into the shelter first before taking up a position behind Kylo Ren. When the sky had darkened and the freezing air had almost reached the shuttle, Kylo Ren held up his hand and Poe saw a change in the foggy air as it billowed in place, hitting an invisible wall. And then it froze, sealing itself upward in a curved barrier reaching up and over the ship, a frozen wave. The man flung his maimed arm out and Poe saw a second ice wall begin to build, preserving them a path back to the shelter door. Yet as the ice walls crept higher and higher, glittering fragments began to break off and fall. The barrier could only go so high, Poe realized, and Kylo Ren's arms were shaking as he struggled to keep it up.

Finally, when flowers of frost began to bloom on the high rock cliffs above them, Kylo Ren let his arms drop slowly. "That's good enough," he muttered, winded, and in wordless agreement, Poe followed him back to the metal door.

The combined total ended up being five days' worth of emergency rations, scavenged from the living quarters and a survival kit Poe found under the main control console. BB-8 probed into the system and found the water storage: ten days' worth of fresh water, a slightly more promising outcome than the food.

"We can't use the 'fresher, then," Poe decided. "It's going to take at least a week to get that ship running. The water's for drinking and nothing else."

From across the room, Kylo Ren regarded him, silent and unmoving. Poe decided to assume that meant he agreed and went on, "We'd better just start rationing things now. These are yours." He pushed two of the four foiled ration bricks across the table, along with a small white bottle, "And this is yours too." Kylo Ren finally stepped forward, picking up the bottle and turning it over in his gloved hand.

"Pain medicine," he observed.

Poe shrugged, "For a guy who just lost a hand, you're acting awfully stable." After a moment, he added, "You know, even with the mask on, I can tell when you're glaring at me."

"Are you going to torment me this entire time?" Kylo Ren demanded.

"This is just how I talk," Poe answered, "and I know you're not going to kill me because you need someone to fly the ship." A frown creased his brow, "Wait, if you can't fly, how'd you get here?"

"I had a pilot fly the shuttle," Kylo Ren answered, "obviously." Something uncomfortable and cold swooped just below Poe's ribcage, and he scowled.

"So you lied to the broker about coming here alone, then. You went back on your word." Kylo Ren didn't respond to that right away, but eventually he shook his head.

"Be honest with me, _pilot_. If you had known it would have turned out this way, would you have come alone?"

"So you knew this was going to go straight to hell beforehand?" Poe asked, carefully dodging the question to avoid admitting Kylo Ren had made a solid point.

"No," Kylo Ren replied shortly, "but I suspected. It doesn't matter now, anyways. The pilot's dead. I found his bones with the ship."

"Stars, aren't you just a treat to talk to," Poe muttered, turning to head to his makeshift bed in the storage vault. "Pleasant dreams."

 

* * *

 

_The Second Day_

 

"You said yesterday that this wasn't possible."

Poe had spent the morning cleaning up more of the freighter's electrical work before deciding to move onto piecing what he could of the cockpit back together. He would need Kylo Ren's help, not just because the cockpit was too heavy and bulky for him to lift and set alone. Using BB-8's welding torch in this atmosphere could easily have killed them all: the open spark needed to be contained. For that, Poe needed another Force shield, and for that, he needed Kylo Ren. So he'd left the ship to summon the other man, only to find that Kylo Ren had decided to try and move the entire ship after all.

"I didn't have enough energy yesterday. I do today," Kylo Ren insisted. "The ship will be more secure if it is moved."

Poe wasn't convinced.

"You didn't even eat anything last night," he said. He'd seen the two ration bricks, untouched, on the table just where he'd left them. Kylo Ren ignored the comment, instead motioning for Poe to get out of his way, which the pilot did. Folding his arms across his chest, Poe frowned up at the freighter. Even for one of the smaller YT models, it remained formidably large.

"Look, what's this about?" Poe asked. "The shield worked last night-" aside from the dents in the upper hull where chunks of ice had fallen, and the part where Kylo Ren had nearly collapsed, "-and I still haven't reattached some of the pieces all that securely-"

"Shut up and let me concentrate," Kylo Ren snapped, and biting back a huff, Poe did just that.

Kylo Ren's long arms were shaking even before the ship gave an almighty groan and began to pull itself up into the air slowly, haltingly. The struts lifted off the ground just as Poe sensed the appearance of an end, a cutoff, like approaching a drop out of lightspeed, and just then the ship dropped heavily back to the ground. Poe let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, "Well, I guess it was-"

Kylo Ren let out a roar of anguish and Poe staggered back, stung by something sharp and formless and _angry_  that flared out from the other man. Over and over again in his mind, all he could hear was _failure failure failure_ , a mental siren, and Poe realized it wasn't coming from his own thoughts.

"Woah, hey-"

"This should have _worked_!" Kylo Ren raged. "I know I could have done it, I _know_ -" His voice died out as Poe seized him by the shoulders and turned him forcefully to face him. For a moment, he seemed too startled to speak, and Poe dove headfirst into that silence.

"Maybe you could have done it and maybe you couldn't, but it's in the past and it didn't work, so _leave_  it," he insisted. Kylo Ren made an attempt to wrestle out of Poe's grip but Poe tightened his fingers on the other man's shoulders.

"It _didn't work_ ," he repeated. "It's _fine_. Calm down."

"Don't tell me what to do!" Kylo Ren snapped back, finally managing to break away.

"Okay, I won't," Poe replied, and paused to take a deep breath. "I still need your help, though. So what am I supposed to do about that?" The other man didn't answer. Presumably, he wasn't too sure himself. Poe decided to take a risk and spoke up again, "I don't care if you can't lift the ship, alright? It's not a failure. It doesn't matter. I still need your help. We just move to Plan B."

Kylo Ren didn't answer, but some of the burning anger that hung in the air seemed to have faded. Poe wondered if the atmosphere made people just as explosively volatile as blaster bolts. Then again, Ben's fuse had been short even as a kid.

"I'm going to keep working on the ship," Poe announced. "If you want to, go rest and eat something and take some of that medicine and mentally regroup, or whatever. You're probably just pissed because you're hungry."

"You're assuming that," Kylo Ren muttered.

"I only wish that were the truth," Poe shot back, and by the time he had climbed back into the freighter, Kylo Ren was walking a path to the metal door.

Poe stayed well away from the other man for the rest of the day and moved his welding plans to tomorrow. Tightening bolts, fixing rivet holes, and getting rid of any excess weight occupied the rest of his evening. As the day grew dim, he left the ship and nearly tripped over a small pile of charred metal: a heap of parts and scraps scavenged from the two ruined ships, Poe recognized. He wondered if this was Kylo Ren's attempt at an apology. But when it came time for him to summon Kylo Ren out of the shelter to face down the approaching ice and put up another shield, Poe found himself biting his lip and staying silent.

Once back inside, BB-8 beeped a greeting from the charging station, and Poe patted the droid's head, "How're the energy cells holding up?" By and large, the shelter had plenty of fuel stored up, but Poe didn't count on that to last forever either. The power was critical to keeping BB-8 up and rolling and to keep the shelter heated and the atmosphere indoors safe, so although the power levels were far from even worrying, Poe checked on them nonetheless. After confirming that the levels hadn't changed much, he ventured into the living quarters to grab his dinner ration chunk and ended up stalling just beyond the door.

Kylo Ren's helmet sat discarded on the table, and a ghost sat on the bed wearing Kylo Ren's clothes.

The first thing that Poe noticed was that despite the other's childhood hopes, Ben - Kylo Ren, now, he reminded himself - had never grown into his ears. But the years had sharpened the rest of his face into something hawk-like and gaunt, bisected by a raw red scar that cut a diagonal over the bridge of his nose and across his right cheek. And yet, beyond the scars and years, Poe could see a shadow of his former friend: the wavy hair, the wide dark eyes. No wonder that - according to Rey - Han Solo had tried to talk him down on Starkiller Base.

Uncomfortably, Poe now realized he'd been staring too long: the other man was glaring back at him.

"What do you want?" Kylo Ren demanded.

"Nothing," Poe murmured. "You just look like someone I know." Kylo Ren answered the tease with silence, keeping his eyes fixed on the blank wall across from him. Poe shook his head and helped himself to a little water from the sink, "You're very fun to talk to."

Kylo Ren threw him a long-suffering look, "I don't want to talk to you."

"Why not?" Poe countered.

"Because you're irritating," Kylo Ren muttered.

"I've been told as much before," Poe spoke, "but that's not going to stop me from talking."

"Look," Kylo Ren snapped, and Poe felt the air go a shade colder, "if you have to run your mouth off, go talk to the droid or to the controls or to the ship. I'm not going to talk to you."

"You've been talking to me this whole time just now," Poe observed, "although it hasn't been what I'd call _scintillating_  conversation." As Kylo Ren's furious gaze snapped to him, Poe raised his hands in a plea of non-violence, "But, it has been a long day, you're tired, and your arm is probably still bothering you because you're too stubborn to take medicine for it. So I'll let you be." He headed for his bunk and shut the door behind him.

"Goodnight, I guess," he wished to the darkness.

 

* * *

 

_The Third Day_

 

BB-8's morning report had started to get grim.

< _There are two remaining food packages,_ > the droid informed Poe after he roused him, < _and the water tank has 8 filtered units left._ >

"Thanks buddy," Poe murmured, running a hand over his face. He had gone for longer without a shower, but now was always about the time that he started to feel gross. If he ever got off this planet, he swore, he was going to find a bath and sit in it for _hours_.

"How's our man in black?"

< _Asleep,_ > the droid answered. < _I shall wake him with electricity if you wish. >_

"Boy, you are just dying for a chance to do that. Nah, forget it, let him sleep. We've got work to do."

Outside, the landscape remained ever the same. Poe sidestepped around the steaming fissures in the ground and took his morning look over the freighter. More dents in the hull from chunks of broken ice, of course: they had fallen when the nightly ice forest had begun its daily melt, but so far, the ship hadn't taken any further damage. Poe called that good news.

When Kylo Ren finally emerged from the shelter a few hours later, he headed off to the wreckage of the ships again, and Poe let him go. He'd need the man's help soon enough, but his presence had so far proved to be a strain on Poe's nerves, and he didn't want to stay around him for longer than he had to. Poe didn't have to be strong with the Force to figure out that both parties were getting irritated by the situation. It frustrated him, honestly. With any other parties - General Leia, Finn, Rey, Jess, Snap, anyone from the Resistance, really - they would have taken out their frustrations and anger with the standard arguments followed by ridiculous laughter and jokes. Tension in the atmosphere could be dissolved. But here and now, Poe's attempts at calming himself down had just resulted in more tension. Ben's arguments weren't frustrating: they were frightening. And Ben didn't joke.

_We have too much of a history, maybe,_  he mused. _Or he's too far gone to be human._

Poe's memory flicked back to Ben's face, and dammit, if the other man caught him calling him Ben he'd probably lose a limb of his own, but now, now that he'd seen the proof of what lay under that reptilian mask, there was no way Poe could go back to calling him Kylo Ren. He looked enough like Ben. Whether any part of Ben remained, after all that had transpired... Poe didn't know.

Poe shook his head at himself and, ignoring a questioning beep from BB-8, thrust himself right back into a nest of scorched wiring.

Hours slid by too quickly as Poe worked, carefully patching up and securing the systems. To his pleasant surprise, when BB-8 beeped at him that the sky was getting dark, he had finished repairing nearly all of the wiring to the crucial parts of the ship. Tomorrow, he'd be able to get started on the bigger jobs, but he'd need to build another bridge for that. Ben would agree regardless - he had no choice - but it wasn't a conversation Poe was looking forward to.

"Give me one moment, buddy, I want to try one thing." With the wiring to the emergency beacon repaired, Poe fired it up and plugged in the frequency of the Resistance's emergency communications channel. Running on a battery it alone used, the beacon beeped to life and began transmitting the ship's location. Poe waited, and waited, but no ships arrived and no signals returned. It was as the broker had warned before: atmospheric interference. The ship would need to be above the cloud cover.

As he and the droid left the ship to fetch Kylo Ren, BB-8 beeped up at him.

< _I am worried about the orbital period._ >

It took Poe a moment to register the communication; he rubbed his face wearily, "The orbital period? Why?"

< _I noticed something. It might be nothing. Poe shouldn't worry._ >

"Well I'm worried now, that kind of defeated the purpose," Poe answered. "Let me know if you find anything out, I guess."

Creeping ice, invisible shield, protective wall, back inside the shelter, and perched in the doorway to the living quarters, Poe opened up his last ration bar, chewing off a small corner for his evening meal.

"You know, these things taste like dirt. I wonder if there's a market for making rations that taste better." He glanced over at Ben, who once again had his helmet off, but the other man didn't answer him.

"I bet there is," Poe went on. "I could work on it myself. Sell new tastier rations to everyone in the galaxy and become filthy rich."

"You won't do that," Ben muttered, and Poe raised an eyebrow at him.

"The man speaks," he observed. "Why's that? I've always wanted to buy my own platinum-plated ship-"

"Because you're a pilot," Ben shot back. "That's all you've ever wanted to do, and you're not going to waste time marketing rations on the side, so shut up already."

A tense silence settled on the room, although Poe felt his tongue itching in a way that had nothing to do with the nutritional sawdust he was eating. Clearing his throat, he spoke up, "So you remember that?"

Ben didn't answer. His gaze was fixed steadily on the blank wall across from him again; he gave no sign that he'd even heard.

"You can't un-say it," Poe reminded him. Ben remained as still as stone. Biting back a sigh, Poe shrugged, "Suit yourself, then." He stood and dusted off his flight-suit before leaving the living quarters, "Pleasant dreams."

The storage crates Poe had been using for a bed seemed to get comfier every night, although perhaps that had something to do with exhaustion and lack of food as well. Poe settled himself down, resting on his makeshift pillow, and let himself dwell on what he'd learned. Ben remembered he'd wanted to be a pilot. That much was clear. But had Ben always known that, or had Ben pulled the information into his mind when he'd tortured Poe aboard the _Finalizer_? Poe wasn't sure. Honestly, he wasn't sure which outcome would be worse, and he dozed off trying to reason that out.

He awoke three hours later to screaming.

Poe's first horrifying thought was that the door had failed and the ice had gotten inside, and as his reflexes fired and he drew his blaster and ran, his second thought was that somehow, some other smuggler had arrived and was in the process of killing the shelter's current squatters. But when he reached the living quarters, Poe realized that the screaming came from Ben, and that Ben was in bed and still apparently sound asleep. _A nightmare,_  Poe understood, and for a moment he felt frustrated that he'd been roused for something so trivial.

But a second glance told him that this wasn't an ordinary bad dream. Ben's face had gone bloodless white, and although he seemed to be struggling, his arms and legs were pinned at his sides, good hand scrabbling at the sheets. Even as Poe stood, observing, the air in the room almost condensed, the shadows growing darker and thicker, and Ben's howling turned into a rattling choke. An image slowly filtered into Poe's mind: skeletal hands, empty eyes. He'd seen it before, just after Ben's lightsaber exploded. He'd hated it just as much then.

Poe reached out and seized the other man by the shoulder and Ben went deathly still. Then, slowly, everything unwound: the heavy air in the room dispersed, the panic faded, and after a moment, Ben's eyes slid open. Bewildered and hazy, it took him a moment to focus, and he turned his attention to Poe.

"You were having a bad dream," Poe explained, now feeling stupid. Fully awake now, it seemed almost foolish that he'd given in to his reflexes and run to save someone who one, probably didn't need saving and two, probably deserved each and every nightmare that overtook him. Realizing that Ben's gaze hadn't moved, Poe let his shoulder go and backed off, "I need your help tomorrow. With the ship. I need you rested." It was a poor excuse, but a believable one. Poe turned and headed for the door to return to his bed.

"Thank you."

Poe glanced quickly over his shoulder, but Ben hadn't moved. There was no mistaking who had spoken, however. "Get some rest," he answered, and left.

 

* * *

 

_The Fourth Day_

 

Poe approached the wreckage of the First Order shuttle from a distance, loudly, and by the time he reached his destination, Ben had stopped crouching over the jumble of scraps and was facing him.

"Hey," Poe greeted, unsmiling. "So, good news and bad news." When Ben didn't answer right away, Poe took a deep breath, "I said, I have good news and-"

"I _heard_  that," Ben interrupted. "I was waiting for you to finish talking."

Oh. Poe shrugged and plunged back in, "I put together the wiring for the critical systems. Everything seems to be working so far, BB-8 ran a few tests. The bad news is that now I need to work on the hydraulics and supports, and for that I need your help."

Kylo Ren's mask tilted to one side, giving him the appearance of a curious panther. "How is that bad news?"

Behind the solarized visor of his helmet, Poe pulled an uncomfortable face. Perhaps he could have phrased that better. "I dunno," he shrugged. "I figured you were having fun, you know... digging through that." He gestured to the pile of charred remains.

"I was looking for something useful," Ben said.

"A lot of this is useful. Actually, we might need a lot of this metal. For you, I mean, to use for the ship-"

"Stop running your mouth and tell me what you need me to do," Ben snapped. Poe shrugged off the other man's irritation; for some reason, he felt like Ben's heart wasn't in his anger today. He picked up a piece of torn support bar and beckoned for the man to follow him.

"I need you to make this into something useful."

Soon Ben sat in the shade of the ship, straightening and shaping metal into missing pipes and rivet plates and T-bars, once in a while venturing into the claustrophobic hollow between the ship's hull and interior to hand a piece to Poe. Just before the sunlight began to fade, Poe and BB-8 managed to make their first successful weld, hinging an airlock door back into its setting while Ben held a shield in place to prevent the droid's welding torch from igniting the atmosphere. By the time they stepped outside to put the night's shield in place, Poe was downright cheerful, and he got the feeling that everyone entered the shelter that night under a warm blanket of satisfaction.

"You think anyone's looking for you?" he asked Ben from his position sitting against the doorframe of the living quarters. Ben's gaze was once again on the wall; he only seemed comfortable looking at Poe when he had his helmet on.

"Yes," he answered finally. Poe bit off a hard corner of ration and spoke up again thickly around the food, "You think anyone's looking for me?"

"Yes," Ben repeated, voice just as empty.

Poe turned this information over in his mind a little bit as he worked through the hard bite of food. An idea slid into his mind, "Think you could use the Force to tell those people where we are?"

Ben shook his head, "It wouldn't work." He sounded conclusive.

Poe tried not to feel disheartened, and he sat up a little straighter, "You won't even try?"

"The Force isn't a communications network," Ben replied, in the weary tone of someone who'd had to have this conversation before. "Maybe I could show what the planet looks like, what the surface looks like, who I'm stuck here with, but that's it. No one would even know where to start looking."

"You know, I think that's the most I've heard you speak since we got here," Poe observed. "Aside from the time you lost your temper over moving the ship. Still fine with that, by the way." When Ben turned to glare at him, Poe shook his head, "Take it easy, alright? I'm just teasing."

"You're always teasing," Ben grumbled.

"It's in my nature," Poe shrugged. "But seriously. You won't even try the Force thing? Send out an S.O.S.?"

Ben took a deep breath, clearly in preparation for a heavy sigh, one that was at once so reminiscent of Leia's exact same mannerism that Poe had to bite back a laugh. "No, don't ask," he pleaded, holding his hands up. "Just go to bed. It's for the best, really." He gave a short wave and left the room so Ben wouldn't see him fighting back a grin.

In the storage room, BB-8 beeped curiously at him.

< _Poe is cracking._ >

"Nah, I'm not losing it," Poe reassured the droid, stifling a quiet giggle. "It's just... this. All of this." He drifted off to sleep as the droid whirred in exasperation and rolled out of the room to charge.

 

* * *

 

_The Fifth Day_

 

< _I am worried about the orbital period._ >

"You said that before, BB," Poe reminded the droid gently, reading up to rub his forehead and knocking his wrist into his helmet instead. In response, BB-8 extended a pincer hand and turned over a few of the shards of ice that lay littering the ground, slowly sublimating back into gas.

< _At this time yesterday, this ice would have melted. The ice is thirty minutes late in melting._ >

"Maybe... maybe the planet runs on a different clock?" Poe suggested. From under the ship where he sat sorting metal with his remaining hand, Ben glanced up at Poe in what he realized was an 'are-you-an-idiot' way. He could sense that through Ben's mask. "So," Poe turned back to the droid, "what do you mean, then, about the orbital period?"

< _The planet has a diurnal cycle like so,_ > the droid explained, spinning on his axis. < _There is a yearly orbital period as the planet moves around the central star. I believe this planet's orbit is elliptic. The days are growing shorter. The ice is taking longer to melt._ >

"You're kidding," Poe said, face blank. He heard Ben ask a question but the words didn't register in his thoughts, too spun about in worry as they currently were. Food, water, energy - all of these were running out, that much Poe had been working to account for. Now, it seemed, one more horrible variable had introduced itself to the equation.

"What's going on?"

Poe blinked, and turned; Ben stood nearby, waiting for an explanation.

"We're going to start running out of daylight," he managed to explain. "BB-8's been timing the days, and it seems they're getting shorter." He saw the shift in Ben's stance; the lowered shoulders and head. Ben knew exactly what the information meant.

"Okay, okay," Poe spoke up. "So we're going to have to deal with some shorter days. We'll just have to get more work done in the meantime. Be more efficient, work harder, work quicker."

"This isn't efficient enough?" Ben asked, incredulous.

Poe decided not to answer that question directly, "I'll see what other systems we can live without. We should remount the cockpit first thing tomorrow morning, get the engine and control lines running, reinforce the support on that busted engine... we don't need everything, we just need enough to get the ship out of the atmosphere."

"And you know exactly which systems we won't need?"

Poe blinked, surprised; Ben's question wasn't a taunt, like he'd been getting used to. It was genuine curiosity. Ben himself didn't know the answer.

"Sure I do," Poe answered. "I've flown busted up ships before. We can still make this work."

They barely even talked for the rest of the day: instead, time was spent furiously welding and soldering things back into place and, when BB-8 needed recharging, Poe escorted the droid inside and left Ben to shape more pieces or scavenge more scraps. The number of useable pieces of the destroyed ships was fast running out, but Poe had a few more ideas up his sleeve, and he introduced them to Ben that night from his place in the doorframe.

"We can go through the storage cache tomorrow, although we need to find a way to break open those chests," he suggested.

"I can do it," Ben answered. _Well,_  Poe mused, _that wasn't as hard as I expected._

"Good," the pilot spoke up again. "If we don't find anything useful there, we can either start breaking apart the control panel here, or we can start breaking apart anything in the ship that's non-essential. Piping for the cabins, ducts for heating, and so on. It'll be an ugly mess of ship but we just need it to fly, that's it."

"Fly and not explode," Ben reminded him, and Poe sighed.

"Yeah, firing up those engines for the first time is going to be a risk-" he cut himself off, realizing that Ben was gesturing at himself.

"Why do you keep forgetting what I can do?" Ben asked, irritated. Poe opened his mouth, shut it, rolled his eyes, took a deep breath, and took a risk.

"Look, Ben, I'm not going to lie to you," he spoke. "My entire experience with you and the Force basically extends to seeing you move things without touching them, having you break into my mind for intel, and seeing you put up the shield over the ship. That's it. I'm not an expert. Are you saying there's some way to get the engines to fire up safely?" Ben didn't answer right away, and after a moment, Poe realized he seemed to be struggling with something.

"Ben?"

"Don't call me that," Ben muttered. He shook his head as if to rouse himself from a daydream, his dark hair flying, "I can help with the engines. I can shield them like before, but leave enough air for ignition."

"That's all I need to know," Poe answered. It'd be like the welding torch on a much larger scale. When he stood to leave for the night, he tossed the remaining segment of his final ration brick onto the table. "Here," he advised, "breakfast for tomorrow." Ben didn't touch it, but looked up at Poe, a question on his scarred face.

"I can fix a ship on an empty stomach," Poe explained. "I don't need it. You can have it if you want." He closed the door behind him when he left, and, on the way to the storage vault to sleep, he stopped by BB-8.

"Hey buddy," he greeted, patting the droid's head. "First thing tomorrow morning, see if you can't find anything in the memory banks here about this orbital period. I want to know how deep we're in it."

The droid beeped a sleepy < _Yes_ > and bobbled over to the charging station. In the vault, Poe tucked himself in on top of the storage crates and murmured a goodnight to the empty air, trying not to let his mind drift to an uncomfortable countdown that now occupied his thoughts.

 

* * *

 

_The Sixth Day_

 

When Poe passed the living quarters the next morning, the door had been left open and the empty ration wrapper had been left on the table. He felt satisfied that he'd done the right thing, but as the day dragged on and he worked with BB-8 to weld the important supports for the cockpit back into place, he began to question his decision. By midday, hunger pangs had started to gnaw painfully at his insides, and he paused to take a break and drink a little water and mentally berate himself for being such a noble kriffing martyr.

_Good job, Dameron, gave the last of your food to a war criminal,_  he thought.

_He used to be your friend,_  he thought again.

_Doesn't mean he's not a war criminal now,_  he reminded himself. But it was over and done, and unless the storage crates turned up more emergency rations - a doubtful prospect - they'd be running on water from here on out.

Across the room, at the control panel for the shelter, BB-8 beeped in alarm.

"Buddy, I could really use some positive news right now," Poe groaned.

It wasn't positive news. BB-8 had discovered a very old file with the basic specs of the world stored on it, likely added right at the time construction on the shelter had been finished. Poe would have regarded this as helpful, had not the information been even worse than he suspected.

"What is it?" Ben asked when Poe returned to the hallway leading up to the cockpit, ready to continue shielding the welding torch from the atmosphere.

"BB-8 was right," Poe confirmed, kneeling down next to the next support to be fixed. "We're sailing into winter here."

"And what happens during winter?" Ben prompted.

"The days get shorter," Poe explained grimly, "until there's no day left at all. The planet's just ice at that point. And it lasts at least fifty standard days."

"Fifty?" There was no mistaking the alarm in Ben's voice. "So-"

"So," Poe interrupted, "we keep fixing the ship, as efficiently and correctly as possible. Remember?"

"You sound like a kriffing protocol droid," Ben muttered, but he refocused and a moment later, under his left hand, the steamy atmosphere cleared from around the broken support. Poe jerked his chin to BB-8 and the droid rolled over, ready to get back to work. No more words were spoken until near the end of the day when, with shaking arms, Ben managed to raise the cockpit into place as Poe and BB-8 worked lightning-fast to bolt it and secure it in place. A small victory, but now the ice creeping back at them across the flat plains felt less like an inconvenience and more like a trap sliding shut.

As Ben stood below the ship, struggling to focus on that night's shield, Poe stood nearby, ready to catch him. But though all of the other man was shaking again by the time the ice had frozen into its protective wave, Ben managed to keep his footing, and the two men staggered back towards the metal door in unison.

The shelter was quiet that night; hunger and weariness had made everyone subdued, and even BB-8, who didn't need to eat, seemed to pick up on the atmosphere and remained uncharacteristically still. After a cup of water for dinner, Poe dragged over some of the smaller crates from the storage room.

"Hey," he spoke up, and Ben lifted his head tiredly. Poe gestured to the crates, "Think you got enough energy to open these?" Ben hesitated, nodded, then walked over to the crates. Poe watched the locks, curious despite his exhaustion, so it came as a complete surprise when Ben instead lifted his knee up and brought a heavy black boot down onto the hinges on the other side, snapping them clean off.

"... what?" Poe managed.

"These are ancient," Ben remarked. "Nobody makes crates with hinges on the outside anymore. This smuggler was a cheapskate." He settled back down on the edge of the bed as Poe wrenched the first crate open. It was empty, as were the second and third ones, but inside the forth one he finally found something other than air.

The crate had only been half-filled, and with some remarkably odd items. Perhaps they were worth a lot of credits, Poe reasoned, but here and now they had little use to him. He tossed aside what looked uncomfortably like part of a Wookiee pelt, a sack full of orange-colored rocks, and a holocomm that contained some kind of manifest report, before pulling out an ancient ration box. Poe felt his soul ignite and lift off.

"Hey, awesome, just my lu-" Poe's words died in his throat as he flipped the box open to reveal a single object: another holocomm, this one an older model, and once charged up, it revealed itself full of images of expansive and beautiful scenery: thick rainforests, waterfalls, graceful cityscapes. Poe groaned and set the holocomm aside, "Why did someone hide their vacation album in a ration box, instead of hiding kriffing _rations_  in it?" He rested his head on his knees, and only glanced up when he heard a soft _click_. Ben had tugged the holocomm through the air and was flipping through the scenery with an unreadable look on his face.

"This is Alderaan."

"What?" Poe sat up a little straighter.

"The pictures." Ben held up the old holocomm. "They're from Alderaan. I've seen a few of them before."

"Wow..." Poe let out a low whistle, "No wonder it's so old..." He waited until Ben finished flipping through the last of the images before standing and reclaiming the holocomm.

"What are you doing?" Ben asked.

"Keeping a souvenir," Poe replied, tucking the holocomm securely in his pocket. "I know someone who might be interested in this." And there it was again, the heavy silence settling across the room like a shroud.

"You know, you could-"

"No," Ben interrupted, voice flat but firm.

"She still misses you," Poe insisted.

"Then she's a fool."

Poe opened his mouth to say something - that Leia wasn't a fool, that she hadn't told anyone aside from Poe what had happened to her son, that -

"My answer is no," Ben repeated, and Poe saw anger catch ember-like in his dark eyes. He shut his mouth, his lips a thin line.

"Alright," he answered. "I'm still keeping the holocomm." Ben didn't respond to that, and when Poe left the room, he had returned to staring at the wall.

Back in the storage vault, Poe struggled to sleep despite his hunger and exhaustion. The room understandably seemed emptier with some of the crates missing; Poe had left them in the control room, just in case they could be destroyed for spare parts. But the emptiness and extra shadows made him feel uneasy, haunted. Poe shut his eyes and began to count backwards from one hundred, taking slow, deep breaths.

He was back on the _Finalizer_ , back in restraints in the small room full of shadows and a figure stood before him, but when Poe lifted his weary head up, expecting to see Kylo Ren's blank mask, what greeted him instead filled him with icy horror.

The figure in front of him stood wrapped in darkness, darkness that floated diaphanous around his legs and arms and shoulders and neck. Only his head was visible: ghastly pale, shrunken, twisted, with two pitch dark holes instead of eyes, a skeletal mockery of a human face. The figure drew closer, whispering, and Poe shrank back against the cold steel of the table but he couldn't get away, he was pinned in place, and he couldn't close his eyes, and even as the sightless gaze of the figure bore into him Poe felt ice crystalize inside his head, freezing and spreading, _let go_ , the whispers continued, _give me what I want and the pain will stop_ , and the ice spread and it _hurt_ like his skull was splitting apart and Poe was certain he was screaming and the figure reached out a bony hand towards Poe's cheek and Poe couldn't run, he couldn't escape, he was going to die here like this-

And the hand that brushed his cheek was warm and suddenly the ice and cold and pain had vanished, and Poe's vision seemed to clear. He lay on his side, cushioned by a carpet of thick grass and shaded over by a tree with shimmering green leaves. As his eyes refocused, Poe glanced up at the person touching his cheek: a woman with a handsome tawny brown face framed by black curls, wearing a smile like the morning sun. Poe felt too weary to move, too weary to even speak, but he did feel safe, and that feeling carried him gently until the soft rush of the breeze was interrupted by a gentle beeping and Poe woke and realized he had been dreaming.

 

* * *

 

_The Seventh Day_

 

"Move the control column, there. Okay... hold it."

Ben held it, and Poe got to work tying it in place with a length of spare wire.

"Good," Poe dusted off the gloves of his flight-suit. "Ok, BB, bring that torch over here, let's give this bird some steering back." The droid obliged, arm at the ready, but pulled up short with a confused _dwoop_.

"What?" Poe asked, and BB-8 spun his lens to the side. Poe followed the direction of the droid's gaze.

"Hey! Ben!" The other man had slumped down in the copilot's chair, chin of his mask resting on his chest. Poe seized him by a shoulder and shook him gently, and Ben's head lolled to the side as he gave off what was - despite the grating voice modulation - an unmistakeable snore.

"Ben! Ground control to Ben! Oi!" Poe rattled the man harder until Ben sputtered and struggled awake. He shook himself and tried to adjust his now askew helmet, and Poe seized his injured arm gently before he rammed himself in the head with his wound again.

"Hey, what gives? I know we haven't eaten in forever, but I need you awake and as lucid as possible here."

Ben wrenched his arm out of Poe's grip and held it protectively to his chest.

"Bad night," he muttered, and left it at that. But before Poe could demand more of an explanation, he saw the fog begin to clear around the seam that needed welding in the control column, and he shrugged, bit back a sigh, and beckoned to his droid. The weld had to be a strong one, but he held the halves securely in place as BB-8 worked, and the droid managed to fuse nearly all of the way through the break before sparks began to flicker around the welding torch, bright yellow before shifting quickly to a dangerous electric blue.

"BEN!"

The other man jerked awake again just in time to trap the explosion within the shield, burning vividly around the control column. BB-8 let out an electronic scream and rolled back and Poe was on his feet in an instant, "Out, outside, c'mon!" He barely remembered racing alongside the other man until Ben flung the shield up into the air and let the explosion take its course, a roiling blue cloud that sparked and settled and finally - blessedly - faded. When the last sparks had blinked out, Poe rounded on the other man, "What's going on?!"

"I-" For the first time since he'd set foot on this planet, Ben seemed to struggle to find his voice. "I didn't sleep well." Poe grit his teeth together and fought back anger. Their plan, their entire plan to get the ship fixed hinged on Ben being able to block out the dangerous atmosphere, and he _needed_  the other man lucid. But Poe's rational thoughts cut off his emotional ones: Ben was slowly starving, just like him, and Poe himself had started the night off badly with that terrifying nightmare. The pilot let out a sigh.

"I'll start patching up the airlock seals, but you need to get some rest. You can't work if you're exhausted," he reasoned, seizing Ben's shoulder and steering him back towards the shelter. To Poe's surprise, Ben followed mutely. He must really have been tired, Poe realized, if he wasn't even going to complain about being ordered around. Their unintentional stay on the planet had started to take a toll on him as well, perhaps.

Ben fell asleep the instant Poe got him dumped on the bed in the living quarters, and Poe had to pull the other man's mask off himself. The dark circles under Ben's closed eyes looked even more pronounced against his pale skin, but Poe left the mask nearby, just in case Ben woke from his nap. Once back outside, he threw himself into fixing the soft seals on the airlocks, and he had them patched and curing by the time night began to fall and he was forced to shake the other man awake for the ship's Force shield.

Once back in the shelter and safe from the ice, Poe noticed Ben still looked glassy-eyed and drowsy as he sipped his nightly cup of water.

"Did you have more bad dreams?" Poe spoke up. He realized he may have been too blunt, but the slow burn of constant hunger and weariness had eaten away at his ability to care much about propriety. Poe's own nightmare still burned unpleasantly in his thoughts. Ben stared at him mutely in response, so Poe, as always in these situations, just kept talking.

"You were having a nightmare a few days ago and I woke you up, remember?" he prompted; that got a nod from Ben.

"Snoke," he answered, one word, before going back to his water. Poe frowned.

"Snoke- Supreme Leader Snoke, that guy, big First Order boss? The general mentioned him-"

"He was trying to get back inside my head."

In his tired state, it took Poe a moment to process those words, but he spoke up quickly, "What do you mean, _back_  inside your-"

"Don't know who he is," Ben murmured, his voice thick with weariness. "He said I had potential. I can't waste it. He got inside my head."

"When?" Poe demanded. He'd suddenly realized that he'd wound up following a dangerous line of conversation. Ben didn't seem to fully understand what he was talking about - that, or he'd gone so tired that he no longer cared.

"He said I had potential," Ben repeated, then seemed to register Poe's words. "I don't remember. Nine. Ten." He turned his drowsy gaze to Poe, "He tried to get inside your head too. Last night. I stopped him."

"You- what?" Poe felt like he'd stumbled under an icy waterfall; the rush of information beating against his head chilled him and he tried to make sense of it. "Snoke was trying to get inside my head? He knows we're here?"

"No," Ben managed. "The Force isn't like that. He knows... you exist. Not the planet." He stared at the cup in his hand, distracted.

"Why was he trying to get inside my head?" Poe demanded, hearing fear in his own voice. That explained the nightmare; the redux of the room on the _Finalizer_ , the horrifying vision... but what about the rest of the dream? "Wait," he interjected, "Ben, I don't get this, okay, you're going to have to put it in terms I understand. I'm not a Jedi."

"I'm not a Jedi," Ben insisted. "Never wanted to be a Jedi." But he disregarded Poe's demands; already, the little energy he'd regained from his nap seemed to have been spent. He leaned harder against his left arm, struggling to keep himself sitting upright.

"Ben?" Poe called out.

"You stopped him first. That night. With the nightmare. Not a Jedi. I can't fly the ship." Ben set his empty cup on the table. "He couldn't take it. The pain, or... or..." The other man wobbled slightly, and Poe stood to his feet, crossing the distance between them just as Ben began to pitch forward. Poe caught him by the shoulder gently.

"Hey, Ben, look-" Poe cleared his throat, "You need to sleep. I need you to make sense tomorrow, yeah?"

"It's you," Ben said blearily, "it's the light," and then he slept.

 

* * *

 

_The Eighth Day_

 

< _At current consumption levels,_ > BB-8 explained, < _water will run out in two days. Energy will run out in four days._ >

"Great," Poe muttered sarcastically through gritted teeth. "Alright, we can fix the engines in that time, probably most of the airlocks, and the hull. That's fine."

It wasn't fine. The period that the planet's surface was free of the destructive ice was growing shorter and shorter, and without proper food, work became slower, and small mistakes began to crop up. The entire morning, Poe had been muttering "focus, focus" under his breath, yet he hadn't noticed it at all until Ben had snapped at him to shut up, that Poe was ruining his own focus with his muttering.

Everyone was running a little bit tense.

Poe hadn't brought up last night's bizarre conversation with Ben; in fact, he had no idea if the man even remembered it, tired as he was. And Ben himself had made no attempts to be talkative: he followed Poe's lead and did what he had to do, but otherwise showed little signs of interest. So now, forced into silence by Ben's grumping and still able to multitask, Poe tried to sort through the information he'd learned. Snoke - presumably the Snoke that was in charge of the First Order - had somehow gotten inside Ben's head when he was young ( _nine, ten,_ Poe recalled, with a sickening twist of his stomach). But he'd been driven out and... and then he'd gone after Ben once more, and then Poe himself?

Poe frowned, frustrated. He wanted - needed - to fill in the blanks, but too many of the pieces were missing. And, he realized as a yelp startled him out of his thoughts, he'd accidentally nudged BB-8 into zapping Ben's left hand.

Ben stood up and rounded on Poe at once, and BB-8 switched off his arc welder just as the protective Force bubble around the ship's shield controls disappeared.

"Kriffing- pay _attention_ , Dameron!" he snarled. Inwardly, Poe felt relieved that Ben had apparently gotten enough sleep to be pissed at him. But also inwardly, he was tired and hungry and not in the mood for Ben's attitude.

"Hey, I'm not the one who nearly got us all killed yesterday," he shot back, standing to his full height. Ben still towered over him.

"I was _exhausted_ -"

"What, so you get a pass and I don't?" Poe demanded. _Stop, don't, the last thing you need to do right now is fight,_  a small voice in Poe's mind tried to remind him, and he shoved it aside.

"Not if you're going to ruin my hand!" Ben snapped, hitting the hand in question against his leg. "Your droid zapped it numb-"

"His name's BB-8," Poe defended, folding his arms across his chest, "and he's the only one here with a kriffing welding torch, so you ought to show a little more respect-"

"Then you ought to show _respect_  by not drifting off in a daydream when I'm trying to help you fix-"

"I'm not daydreaming, I'm trying to make a plan-"

"Why don't you just stick to _fixing the ship_ , because that's all you're good at-"

"Hey, maybe," Poe snapped, his pride injured and his mind screaming _don't do it, don't do it,_  "if BB-8 zaps your other hand off, you won't match your uncle so much, I'm sure you'd like-"

Ben went for Poe's throat with his numb hand and ended up tackling him into the side of the ship with a _bang_ ; Poe grabbed a handful of Ben's mask and tried to kick him in the stomach; he couldn't even make out what the other man was shouting at him but it didn't matter, Ben had always been a kriffing idiot and had always made the worst decisions and Poe was going to _kick his ass-_

A klaxon cut through the fight like a razor, a shrieking high pitched wail that caused Poe to abandon his attempts to hit the other man and instead cover his own ears - which proved useless, as he still had his helmet on and just ended up grabbing the sides. Ben had attempted to do the same and had ended up on the ground, swearing in pain and struggling and failing to stand himself up from the floor using only his legs. Some distance away, BB-8 sat calmly, blaring the hellish noise from a set of speakers.

"Okay, BB, okay, we're done, it's fine-"

The droid wasn't convinced; the siren continued.

"It's _fine_ , BB! LOOK, WE AREN'T FIGHTING-"

Finally, blessedly, the siren cut off, and BB-8 rolled in a tidy little circle, apparently satisfied. < _Poe needs to fix the ship,_ > he reminded, < _Poe can't fix the ship if he's fighting with his friend._ >

"He's _not_  my friend," Poe insisted, glaring at Ben.

< _Poe is tired and hungry and making poor decisions,_ > BB-8 observed.

"That's not a poor decision, alright?!" Poe griped, now holding his hands to his helmet in exasperation. "I have every reason to want to punch him in the head. He's _killed_  people, you know?! And this isn't about war, alright, I know I've killed people too, other pilots, but _never_  like that, never anyone who didn't deserve it-"

"Who are you to decide what's deserved?!" Ben's low voice rumbled back into the conversation; he'd managed to climb to his feet and Poe rounded on him. He could hear both fury and uncertainty behind that modulator and despite his misgivings, he plowed ahead.

"Don't you dare argue that line of logic with me," he swore, hands balled into fists at his sides. "Did you know your mother told me that you'd been destroyed with the rest of Luke Skywalker's students? She'd rather let me believe you were dead than tell me the truth about what happened to you. Did you know that?"

"I did," Ben answered, and before he could finish whatever he had to say, Poe plowed onwards.

"Oh, that's right, you did, probably because you _tortured_  me after I got captured and pulled that information out of my head along with who knows what else! You were my _friend_ , Ben! Didn't you recognize me?"

"I-"

"And this was _after_  you ordered your troopers to massacre everyone in Tuanul, after you killed Lor San Tekka-"

"Poe-" Ben had taken a step back.

"You killed Han, you tried to kill Finn, and Rey, and-" Poe took a deep breath, "And you know what? Maybe I should stop trying to fix this ship, honestly, maybe we both ought to just stay on this kriffing dustball and wait out the orbital period and freeze to death-"

"It was a test!" Ben blurted out, and Poe paused, breathing hard in the confines of his helmet. Caught off-guard, he tried not to ponder the meaning behind those words too hard. There had to be an explanation. There had to.

"What do you mean?" he panted, and Ben lowered his head, silent. It was clear to Poe that the other man seemed to have stepped over some invisible line that he'd set for himself.

"Ben?" The other man finally looked up, surveying Poe through the slitted visor of his mask.

"Do you really think we're going to be able to get off this planet?" he asked. Poe took another deep breath. He wasn't happy with the change of conversation topic, but somehow he could see where this might be leading.

"At this point? I don't know. It'll take a few more days to finish fixing most of the ship. Whether it'll survive a flight... I don't know." He watched as Ben's shoulders lowered, heard the other man heave a sigh.

"If it comes to a certain point... I'll explain it to you."

"I would prefer an explanation _now_ ," Poe couldn't resist, but the irritation, the fight had gone out of his system.

"I know you would," Ben replied, "but right now, the sun's out, and we ought to be working."

"Yeah," Poe nodded. "Yeah."

That night, after dragging more storage crates to the living quarters in a continued futile search for something useful, Poe sat atop the largest one and ran his hands through his tangled hair. His temper had settled back to normal levels, and right now, Poe just felt tired. But he needed to square at least one thing before turning in for the night.

"Hey." He waited until he had caught Ben's attention before continuing. "I wanted to say I'm sorry. For accidentally zapping you. And for causing a fight and, and calling you a murderer-"

"I am a murderer," Ben interrupted, and his gaze started to slide away. "I murdered people. It's still true."

"You said it was a test," Poe added, "which means I don't know the entirety of what's going on. So just let me apologize, alright?" Ben hesitated, then nodded.

"If I hadn't destroyed your ship or tried to attack you when this first started, we wouldn't be trapped here," he said, quiet. "I'm sorry for that." A pause, a breath. "The Stormtrooper, the one who fought me on Starkiller. Did he live?"

"He did," Poe confirmed. "His name's Finn, and he's got a big scar now, but he made a full recovery."

"I see," Ben answered, and fell silent. Poe cleared his throat and stood from the crate, starting to drag the empty ones into the hall to await disassembly.

"So, now that we've cleared the air a little bit," Poe spoke up again, "I'm going to be sleeping on the floor in here tonight, on the rug. BB says we can make the energy cells here last longer if we shut off the heat to the control room and the storage vaults."

"That's fine," Ben answered, voice calm and flat. "It doesn't bother you to stay in here?"

"The danger's out there," Poe shrugged, jerking his chin towards the door. "And as long as you don't kill me for snoring or something, I'm not concerned."

For a half-second, he thought Ben almost smiled. But the moment flashed away in time and the other man lay back in bed, rolling over onto his uninjured arm to rest. "I'm not going to kill you for snoring."

"Good," Poe confirmed. "Pleasant dreams, then."

 

* * *

 

_The Ninth Day_

 

More and more ice remained, melting slower and slower each morning as Poe kicked his way over to the ship. The major hydraulic lines had all been repaired, and he and Ben had dismantled a few of the more secure storage crates as well as a superfluous section of the control panel in order to refill the hydraulic pumps.

Poe had gotten good at ignoring the constant hunger gnawing in his gut, but the constant day-to-day slog on such low energy had started to burn him down. His movements felt more and more robotic. He yawned constantly despite getting enough sleep. Once in a while, bright spots burst into the corners of his vision and he had to sit down for a while. He caught Ben resting a few times, so at least Poe didn't have to feel guilty about his breaks.

That afternoon, Ben announced that he'd scavenged all that he could from the remains of the two other ships: anything left in the charred craters of their destruction was either too small or too damaged to be of use. Poe set Ben the task of taking apart the storage crates for additional scrap, summoning him over whenever he and BB-8 needed something welded.

Time began to pass in a controlled blur. _You're hungry,_  Poe reminded himself, _and you're tired. Everyone's hungry and tired._  Even BB-8 had been taking smaller and smaller charges each night in an effort to keep the electricity in the shelter lasting for as long as possible. Everyone moved slower, lethargic, deliberate. There was no more room for careless mistakes, for irritated explosions of anger, for wasted energy or much else. There was work, water, sleep, ice, and dim sunlight that seemed to grow dimmer every day.

"Do you think anyone ever lived here at all?" Poe wondered aloud, soldering the ship's compressor back together with Ben's help.

"No," Ben answered.

"Why's that?"

"Sometimes, in places that have been abandoned or emptied, I can sense residual traces of life."

"Like ghosts," Poe observed.

"Like ghosts," Ben echoed. "But there's nothing like that here. It's always been lifeless. It's probably why someone built that smuggler's hideout here. There's no reason for anyone to be here at all."

"Except for us," Poe said, forcing cheerfulness, and he swore he could sense Ben rolling his eyes under that black mask.

 

* * *

 

_The Tenth Day_

 

Poe asked BB-8 to start letting him know when each hour went by, and the droid took easily to the task, broadcasting a chime every so often as time dragged by. The ship's controls had been fixed as thoroughly as they were ever going to get, and Poe moved around to the back of the ship to start repairing the damaged engine. He didn't even need it fully functional - the ship could fly on less, although it would be a desperately bumpy and dangerous ride. He just needed the engine not to explode when he fired it up.

On the way back to the engine after his midday break, the days of hunger and weariness hit him like a punch. Poe's legs dragged to a stop, just above one of the fissures in the planet that vented steam. He had to jump over the fissure or walk around it to get to the engines, he knew. But his legs weren't obeying him. Instead, flashing purple spots clouded the corners of his vision and his knees buckled as he dropped forward.

_Oh,_  Poe realized, _so this is it._  The fissure yawned up before him and just as Poe lost consciousness something slammed into his waist like a metal bar.

When he came to, he was lying on his back and staring up at the gray sky. Craning his neck allowed him to see Ben sitting nearby, curled over himself with his injured arm tucked protectively against his chest.

"What... what..." he managed, and the other man glanced up. His shoulders were shaking.

"You passed out," Ben answered, his voice surprisingly steady. "I caught you with the wrong arm."

"Oh." Poe waited until he felt the blood flowing back into his cheeks before pushing himself up onto his elbows. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Ben said automatically. "Just help me fix the bandages tonight and... and don't do that again."

"Sure thing, buddy," Poe answered.

He kept his promise, peeling off the old bacta wrappings that evening in the shelter of the living quarters. As Poe unwound another strip of bandage, he motioned for Ben to hold out his injured arm. The wound still looked charred and raw in sections. Poe bit back a shudder and said, "Hey, you should get this treated first thing when we get off this place. Try not to hurt it anymore, this is the last of the bacta." Ben nodded silently, shutting his eyes and going still until Poe had finished rewrapping his arm. Poe picked up the medicine bottle after that; it had remained untouched on the table until now and had collected a thin layer of dust. "Want some?"

"No," Ben answered, and it was a moment before he opened his eyes again. "I can't afford to have my thoughts clouded."

"I know what you mean," Poe said, and set the bottle aside again. So much for that; the time for luxuries like medicine and the gentle highs it sometimes brought had long since passed. "Have you thought about after this place more, though? Where you're gonna go after we get off-planet?" Ben didn't answer. As with before, Poe filled the silence with a calculated risk, "You could come back."

"No, I can't," Ben replied. "No one wants me there. I'd be imprisoned or executed."

"Somehow I doubt that," Poe countered, thinking of Leia. "What's so good about going back to the First Order, then? More dealings with this Snoke guy?" That rendered Ben silent, and for the thousandth time, he turned his eyes on the wall, lost in thought.

"I don't know," he spoke up eventually. "I don't know what I'll do."

"Think about it," Poe advised. "We're gonna be out of here soon enough. We're running out of time."

 

* * *

 

_The Eleventh Day_

 

< _Energy cells are running low,_ > BB-8 reported that morning. < _Water tank onto last unit._ >

"Got it, BB-8," Poe answered, taking a sip of his breakfast. "More strict rations for us, then. What's the status on the orbital period?"

< _Approximately five days until the ice will no longer melt during daytime._ >

"Great, maybe we don't need the stricter rations after all," Poe muttered bracingly, and he drained the cup.

"Has the temperature been getting that much colder?" Poe glanced over at Ben, ready to answer, but to his surprise Ben wasn't addressing him: his gaze was on BB-8. The droid spun in confusion to Poe, then looked back to Ben.

"Go ahead, BB, you can answer him," Poe encouraged. To Ben, he added, "I didn't know you could speak binary."

"I know a little," Ben answered, still watching the droid. BB-8 gave an uncertain whirr before piping up.

< _The atmospheric temperature has been dropping in accordance with the shorter periods of daylight,_ > he answered. < _Poe has asked me to take readings._ >

"Smart," Ben answered, and Poe wondered if he was being complimented.

"BB-8 was the one who noticed the changes," he said, evasive, and Ben gave an appreciative nod to the droid, who answered with a more confident beep. Standing, Ben reached for his black helmet and tugged it on before connecting the breathing tubes to his support pack, "We ought to get started, then."

"Why do you wear that kind of helmet?" Poe asked as he joined the other in heading towards the door. "Must be awfully hard to see out of."

"It's to hide my face," Ben explained, "so no one knows who I am." Once, perhaps, a few days earlier, even, Poe knew that kind of question would have earned him a glare. But they were both had come beyond that, through hunger, exhaustion, or some other force.

"It's kind of useless around me, you know," Poe managed to joke, and Ben snorted.

"You're not the First Order. Snoke even made it so that using my old name could be considered grounds for punishment."

"Buddy," Poe muttered emphatically, "I hate to break it to you, but Snoke sounds like Grade A Mawgax guano."

Ben seemed like he wanted to respond to that, but the shelter door slid open and the both of them headed out in silence towards the ship.

By the end of the short day, Poe had managed to stabilize the broken engine - at least, he hoped as much. It would be impossible to tell for sure without running it, and at risk of burning out both his and Ben's slowly shrinking energy reserves, he had decided against it. From here on out, it was all hull: welding shut the torn seams in the ship's exterior that the initial night in the ice had wrought. With the help of BB-8 and Ben, he managed to seal a few smaller ones, but the larger ones would have to wait until tomorrow.

"We're getting there," he repeated to himself, lying prone on the floor of the living quarters. "We're getting there."

BB-8, powered down and charging, and Ben, already sound asleep, did not answer.

 

* * *

 

_The Twelfth Day_

 

Poe got straight back to welding at first light, with BB-8 working as fast and as carefully as his protocol allowed and with Ben hovering nearby and keeping the combustive atmosphere at bay. Tear by tear, the ship began to seal up, and the supply of scrap metal from the destroyed ships and the storage crates provided some extra materials for the job.

At midday when the group ventured inside for a short break, the last of the water ran out.

To Poe's surprise, BB-8 honestly seemed the most distressed about it, but then again, the droid had the clearest mind at the moment. He gave BB's dome a reassuring rub, "Steady there, buddy. We've got one or two more days." Until what, he left unsaid.

"It was a long time coming," Ben echoed. Fighting through his injury and a lack of proper nourishment, his face had gone even more gaunt but his eyes remained dark and focused and determined. Poe wondered if that was from the Force or just from Ben's own strength of will. As a child, Ben had always been stubborn. That didn't seem to have changed.

"What is it?" And Ben had noticed Poe was watching him.

"Nothing," Poe muttered, shaking his head. "I was thinking how we both need a shower and a shave." Ben nodded in clear agreement before pulling himself out of his chair with a quiet groan.

"Back to work," he spoke, commanding. "Daydreams are for later."

The rest of the day passed in slow agony. After an hour, Poe became acutely aware of how dry his mouth and throat felt, and across from him, Ben's focus seemed to be slipping. To his credit, Ben never came close to dropping his Force shields entirely, and BB-8 did a good job of nudging and beeping warnings as needed. But by the time night began its icy prowl towards the rocky cliffs, Poe and Ben had to lean against each other just to make the journey back to the shelter after Ben's painful struggle to put up the barrier sapped the last of his strength. It was some small blessing that things seemed to be freezing more quickly as of late.

"This is hell," Poe groaned as he lay back on the floor. "I've died and this is hell."

"If this were hell you'd be talking a lot more," Ben muttered from his position on the bed. Poe shot him an incredulous look.

"Did you just _tease_  me?" Ben didn't answer. "Stars, maybe I really am dead." He ran his hands through his snarled hair, "Distract me."

"Why is that my responsibility?" Ben groaned.

"I don't know," Poe muttered. "Tell me a story or something, you always had the better imagination. Tell me a story."

"I don't want to talk," Ben muttered in response to that. "My mouth feels like sand."

"Well, I can't tell a story," Poe protested. "You know all of mine, or the ones after... after, y'know, they involve me blasting a bunch of your First Order friends out of the sky."

"They aren't my friends," Ben said. "It's only ever been me."

"Sounds awfully lonely."

"That much isn't new."

Abruptly, Poe's mind filled with memories: a pale boy with dark hair slipping away from the crowd to hug Poe at Poe's mother's funeral, the same boy - slightly older - ditching his own parents on Yavin 4 to climb trees with Poe, always solitary, always apart, always a loner except for the times he spent at Poe's side. Poe felt inexplicably happy. _It's the dehydration,_ he reminded himself.

Instead of a story, Poe eventually convinced BB-8 to use the last of his daily charge ration to play a little music, a few quiet songs from a selection he and Poe had picked out together back on base. Poe drifted off with a melody ghosting over his ears, soft and low.

 

* * *

 

_The Thirteenth Day_

 

"I think I'm hearing voices," Ben admitted.

"Isn't that what happens when you're Force sensitive?"

Poe could sense the weary glare through the slit of Ben's mask. "Very funny," the man in black muttered. "I meant besides that."

"Besides- you normally hear voices, then?" Poe asked.

"We literally _just_  had this discussion," Ben groaned. "Weld this shut so I can take a break and go kick a rock and pretend it's your head."

They had kept up a running conversation with each other since the morning, to keep them distracted from their dry throats and bleeding lips - and hopefully to keep them focused. It seemed to work only half as well as Poe had hoped. He redoubled his efforts and helped BB-8 track along the torn metal, shutting his eyes as the bright spark of the welding torch sealed the tear. Once the light had gone out, Poe opened his eyes and Ben let his Force shield drop.

"One more down," Poe said, bracingly. "Maybe... twenty more to go. We can finish this by today."

"Good," Ben muttered. "I don't want to die here."

The group moved to the next breach in the hull.

"So are you afraid of dying?" Poe asked, pressing the metal seam closed.

"No," Ben answered, "I just don't want to die here. I hate this place." Well, Poe realized, that was certainly something that they could agree on. He licked his lips and shut his eyes as BB-8 got to work on the next weld. For a while, nothing but the _snap snap snap_  of the welding torch hit Poe's ears.

"Weren't you going to take a break?" Poe asked, after their designated cut had been sealed up. "You said something about a break."

"I don't need a break," Ben answered. "I was just making conversation."

"If we get out of here alive," Poe went on, "I'm going to take a break. I'm going to take a _vacation_. Maybe go home for a few days."

"Home," Ben echoed. "Yavin 4?"

"The very same," Poe responded. "Hey, the invitation still stands."

"The invit- Poe," Ben said, and Poe could hear the resignation, the weariness in his tone. "I can't go back. I told you already."

"Yeah, you did, and I still don't understand why," Poe countered as he headed to the next scar in the ship's hull. "Do you still want to go back to the First Order?"

"I don't know." Ben knelt down next to their target and held out his hand, focusing. "I didn't like the New Republic, but that's as good as gone. Their methods were too chaotic. The Resistance... " He shook his masked head, "They're too small to accomplish anything."

"The Resistance is led by one of the few people who isn't going to shoot you on sight," Poe pointed out. Ben shook his head again.

"You don't know that now."

"Ben." Poe waited until he knew Ben was looking at him, "You could destroy an entire galaxy and she'd still be hoping you'd come home."

"I don't want to destroy a galaxy," Ben groused.

"See, already we're getting somewhere." Poe shut his eyes and let BB-8 get to work on the weld. "You know, a few days ago, I thought we were both going to end up dead for sure."

"We could still end up dead," Ben countered. "It's a matter of time."

"I _meant_ ," Poe emphasized, "I thought somebody would snap. I'd kill you, or you'd kill me, something like that. But you kept your promise. You didn't go inside my head."

For some reason, the silence that followed that statement felt tenser than Poe would have expected, and he opened his mouth just as Ben spoke up.

"I did break my promise. But I had to, to stop Snoke."

"What do you mean?"

"That night, you were having that bad nightmare - and the next day, I was tired, remember?"

"Yeah," Poe answered, confused - he hoped it was just from the dehydration, and not from having the wool pulled over his eyes. "You nearly got us all killed."

"Snoke wanted to use you - he knew you were near me, and he knew your defenses weren't as good. So he tried to get inside your head. I... I forced him out and stopped him, and I pulled up something happier for you to see instead."

Poe felt numb, but in a weird, comfortable way. "That... that was you?"

Ben nodded, and went on, "You did the same for me, remember?"

Poe shook his head, gesturing to the next gap to seal, "That's not possible. I'm not Force sensitive."

"That doesn't matter." Ben followed him over, rambling on through his exhaustion as though his words were the only thing keeping him upright. "Snoke... Snoke's been in my head for years. When my lightsaber exploded, when I lost my hand, the pain drove him out."

_The dark shockwave,_  Poe remembered, _the screaming shadow after the explosion._

"Anyways," Ben went on, "a few days later he tried to get back into my head when I was sleeping. I tried to fight him off but I was tired and hurt and... you came over and thought I was having a normal nightmare and tried to wake me up."

"Yeah," Poe answered, a furrow between his brows. "Yeah, I remember that, but I'm still not a Jedi or anything."

"The Force flows through all living things," Ben spoke, and his voice, laden and slow from exhaustion, made him sound almost like a teacher. "It flows through you, too, and... and you're a good person, Poe. Better than me. There's a lot of the light side in you. You passed some of that in to me when you touched my shoulder and it drove Snoke out."

_It's the light,_  Poe heard the echo of Ben's words, _it's you._  He felt strangely proud, and strangely protective.

"So... are you saying... I'm a good influence?"

Ben snorted, "Don't let it go to your fat head." But after a moment, his tone softened, "I can think a little more clearly now, though. When I'm not, you know, busy dying from thirst."

"Good to hear," Poe answered, and refocused. "Let's finish this."

By nightfall, they had managed to seal all of the major fissures in the hull, but after Ben flung up the shield over the ship, Poe had to half-drag him back to the shelter: the other man had nearly passed out from weariness. The world had started to wobble for Poe himself and by the time Poe got BB-8 and Ben inside, it was all he could do not to collapse in the entryway.

< _Poe will freeze to death,_ > his droid chided him gently, and Poe dragged himself slowly into the living quarters and sealed the door behind him.

"Tomorrow morning," he rasped, and Ben turned to look at him with glazed and sunken eyes. Poe repeated himself, "First light, tomorrow morning. We fly."

"The ship's ready?" Ben's voice had gone dry and hushed.

"It doesn't matter," Poe heard himself answer.

 

* * *

 

_The Fourteenth Day_

 

This time, Ben had to half-drag Poe back to the ship after the morning's ice had melted. Being in a pilot's seat again seemed to give Poe a burst of extra energy, and he began firing up the electrical systems, a grim look frozen on his face, while Ben held a steady shield around the parts of the ship most likely to spark and explode.

"Oxygen system's working, flaps and ailerons working," Poe muttered to himself hoarsely, going through system after system. "Gravity's... mostly working, that's fine-"

< _Poe, there is ice._ >

"I know, BB, the stuff isn't melting as quickly, 's'why we're blowing this rock-"

"Poe," and this time it was Ben speaking. "The ice is coming back."

"What?" Poe squinted through the done of the cockpit and saw the glittering white carpet edging towards them through the fog. In the distance, the first of the massive icy spires had frozen in place, and more were rising and shattering. "The sun's still out!"

< _The orbital period,_ > BB-8 beeped, shrill and worried. < _The planet is too far away from the star!_ >

"Okay, okay," Poe took a deep breath, "Ben, shield the engines, I'm firing them up."

"Done," Ben answered, his voice wavering. "Hurry."

A hard vibration shuddered through the ship as the engines roared to life, but nothing exploded, and as Poe yanked the controls back, the freighter shuddered again, wavered, and then wobbled off the ground into the air.

"Hah!" Poe cried out happily, and he could hear Ben shouting at him to stop laughing and get the ship higher, so he did, increasing power to the engines and angling the freighter up, just as the ice converged below them, stabbing up at the ship but unable to reach high enough to hurt it.

"You can drop the Force shield, engines are firing fully," Poe called back to Ben with a manic grin on his face, and he turned back to the controls and gunned the freighter, pushing it up, up, up through the filthy atmosphere, up from the dust and the ice and the freezing lifeless planet. He could hear bangs and pops and snapping and creaking and what sounded like BB-8 hitting a wall, but Poe couldn't look back, not when he had the sky ahead of him, not when he was so close, _so close_ , to being safe-

He flipped the freighter's build-in shields to active and drove the ship harder and the atmosphere grew thinner and thinner until all that Poe could see ahead of him was the vast and starry expanse of space.

"Slow down!" he heard Ben shouting. "You're going to break it apart-"

"I can't slow down, we have to get above the atmosphere!" Poe shouted back, and the clanking and banging was growing louder but if he cut the engines now they'd just fall back-

The ship gave a massive jolt as it broke through the final layer of the planet's atmosphere, and Poe let out a whoop and kept flying, "We did it, we did it, BB-8, grab me the coords for the nearest inhabited-"

The ship gave another huge jolt and alarms began flashing from the control panel in front of Poe. He checked each of them automatically: engine fire, followed by engine failure, and another engine failure. Settling into a trance, he shut all engines but the functional one down and the shuddering and creaking of the ship settled into a quiet rumble. The lights began to dim.

"Poe, what's going on?" Ben had crept up behind the cockpit chair, looking out into space over Poe's shoulder.

"Just engine trouble," Poe answered, trying to keep his voice light. Another two alarms blinked active on the control panel, and Ben leaned over to read them.

"Hull breach," he observed. "Atmosphere levels dropping."

Wordlessly, Poe stood and opened a small cabinet next to the pilot's chair, and withdrew two oxygen masks attached to small canisters.

"Found these a few days ago, but my helmet and your mask were acting as good enough filters, so we didn't need them on the planet," he explained, passing one to Ben, who tugged it over his solemn face.

Poe pulled his own mask on and then sat down on the floor of the cockpit. He could still see the shiny seam where he and BB-8 had welded it back in place while Ben had held it up.

"How bad is it?" Ben asked, sinking down against the wall across from Poe.

"I never got the hyperdrive repaired," Poe mused, feeling strangely calm. "It would have taken us too long to fly to the next world anyways. No water on the ship."

A stillness settled over the ship. The gentle rumbling, Poe decided, felt almost like a heartbeat.

"We got off that planet," Ben spoke up, his voice soft.

"We did," Poe echoed. "Silver lining and all that." He frowned, and squinted into the dark depths of the freighter. "Where's BB?"

"I think his power ran out," Ben admitted. "He went all quiet and dark and hit a wall pretty hard when the ship angled higher."

"Oh." Poor little droid. He'd been so helpful and deserved better than that kind of treatment. Poe pushed himself to his feet, and to his surprise, Ben joined him.

"I'll get him," he stated. "You stay here." He vanished for a few minutes and returned with BB-8 floating gently in front of him. He set the silent droid down next to Poe, and Poe wrapped an arm protectively around him, watching as Ben made to sit back down against the wall across from them.

"Hey," Poe interrupted. "Come over here, it'll be easier to talk."

"Of course you want to talk," Ben muttered, but he caught himself and moved closer.

"It's better than just sitting in the quiet waiting for something to happen," Poe reasoned.

Ben only shrugged.

"I don't know about you," Poe murmured, resting the back of his head against the freighter's wall, "but I'm mad. We spent all that time working on the ship... we ran out of food, we ran out of water, we managed to get the damn thing working... we made it to _space_ , Ben, and... maybe I didn't do a good enough job on the engines or the wiring-"

"You did a better job than I could have ever done," Ben interrupted.

"And now we're either going to suffocate or freeze to death," Poe huffed, giving a sigh that clouded the inside of his mask up.

"If it's any consolation, I've heard both ways are painless," Ben offered. Poe shot him a look.

"That isn't much of a consolation, buddy."

"Well, what would you rather hear, then?"

Poe let his mind drift, and it wandered from empty idea to empty idea until a memory flared to life, bright and important, and he settled on that.

"You said... if it ever got to a certain point, you'd explain it to me. The...'just a test' comment."

"I remember," Ben murmured, eyes widening a little in recognition.

"You feel like explaining now?"

A pause, a silence, and then Ben answered.

"I always wanted to be stronger," he started. "I always wanted more control. And you know, in the beginning... it wasn't ever about power, or about politics. When I was young, my parents would argue with each other a lot, and I couldn't do anything about it. I always just had to run away, make myself scarce. And the Force... I got into so much trouble. I broke things on accident so often. I caused problems I didn't even understand how to cause. My mother was worried about me, and my father was terrified of me."

Poe listened, silent, rapt.

"You and Chewbacca must have been my only friends, honestly," Ben went on, "because everyone else thought I was weird or frightening. And I begged my parents not to send me away to Luke's academy. I had so little to hang onto already." Ben ran a hand through his tangled hair, an anxious gesture.

"And all of a sudden there was a different voice inside my head, a voice telling me I wasn't scary, I was _special_ , and that he could teach me to control my abilities. He could teach me to be stronger." Ben took a deep breath in his oxygen mask, and bit back a sigh, "By the time my parents changed their mind and sent me away for good, I had already learned so much. I didn't know I had started passing into the dark side and pulling strength from my emotions until Luke explained it officially to me at the academy, and by that time, things weren't so black and white."

Ben sank back against the wall, "You hear so much about the light side and the dark side of the Force, how one is good and one is bad, but it isn't at all clear. The Jedi in the past used to conscript children into their academy when they were very young - the children never got any choice. And that's just one part of it all." He shook his head, "Training wasn't bad... not really. And maybe I could have made a better decision if my mind had been clearer, but the voice - Snoke - convinced me otherwise. I didn't need the _Jedi_ , I didn't need their training or their balance or their light and inner peace. He'd teach me everything, but I had to make myself stronger first."

Poe watched Ben, too exhausted to feel true horror or true grief. And Ben kept talking, steady and weary.

"To make myself stronger, he said, I had to push myself fully into the dark side. That was the only way. And to do that... I had to destroy what was holding me back."

Ben fell silent, and Poe worried that he might be forced to ask his own questions, still confused. But then Ben spoke up again, looking away from Poe, and his dark eyes were haunted.

"The academy was first. There couldn't be anyone around who might be able to stop me in the future. That was complete control, Snoke said - getting rid of your enemies before they even pose a threat to you. Luke Skywalker escaped that. And after that... getting rid of people in my way became a little easier, but I still didn't feel stronger. I felt weak, helpless... the First Order is all about control, you know, and I threw my lot in with them mainly for that. I hate their leader but they'd tell you their methods are effective... they're no better than the Jedi, though..." Ben shook himself; he'd sensed he was getting off topic.

"Lor San Tekka was an old family friend, and when the First Order learned he had a part of the map that led to Luke Skywalker, Snoke sent me there. I had to kill him, it'd make me stronger to sever a connection with someone I'd been close to before." Ben drew another deep breath. "It didn't work. I was angry, and lost, and following First Order procedure, I ordered the rest of the villagers destroyed.

Poe realized he was holding his breath; this part of the story he'd witnessed himself.

"All of that - the academy, Lor San Tekka, you, Han Solo - Snoke set them all as tests, for me to pass and push myself further to the dark side, and none of them worked."

Poe realized Ben's eyes were shining.

"And now, now that he's not in my head and now that I'm probably going to die in a short while regardless, I realize that I shouldn't have ever listened. Nothing worked, nothing ever worked, and people, so many people are dead for it."

It was sick, Poe thought. Ben had lured himself into a trap, a struggle for something he'd always wanted, and that had been Ben's fault. But inside the trap, somehow, he'd been convinced that it was the place he belonged, it was what was best for him.

"How much of it was you, killing people? How much of it was Snoke?"

Ben didn't answer, but responded by burying his face in his hands.

"I'm sorry," he choked out, his voice faint and terrified. "I'm so sorry."

"You," Poe went on, "you said I was a test- your test was to torture me?"

"No," Ben answered, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. "I was supposed to get the information about the map and then kill you."

"You didn't, though."

Ben shook his head slowly. "The academy students, Lor San Tekka... we were friendly but never close. My father and I have never gotten along. But you..." He caught Poe's gaze and gave him the tearstained smile of a dying man, a man with no more secrets. "I could never kill you, Poe. Not you."

For the first time in a while, Poe felt at a loss for words.

"I made my excuse and left you alone and while I tried to think of a plan to avoid killing you, someone else decided to rescue you instead," Ben continued, "and when I heard about it, I was relieved."

"They needed a pilot too," Poe remembered, with a short laugh.

"It's a good thing you became a pilot, in the end," Ben said. "It was always your dream."

"I'm glad you remembered that, before," Poe mused. "You know, buddy, I like it a lot better when Snoke isn't in your head."

Ben nodded his agreement, but then shook his head. "I let him in in the first place," he mused, solemn.

"Ben, you were a child," Poe interjected. "You couldn't have done anything."

"I could have tried to kick him out later, when I became stronger. I could have run away, I could have told someone who would have believed me - Luke, or you," Ben went on. "I didn't. I thought having power, having _control_ , would make things better, and this is where I've ended up." He gestured vaguely to himself, "Not the ship, not with you, that's not what I mean, I mean... working as an underling and an assassin to a group of people who want control at the cost of planets. _Planets_ , Poe. _Billions_  of lives. I never wanted that. I followed them all the same, because I selfishly thought that next time, for me alone, things would get better."

Poe watched the other man curl up into himself, trying to shut out the weight of the poor decisions and guilt heaped on his back.

"Come back with me. To the Resistance," he offered.

Ben glanced up from where he'd been resting his forehead on his knees.

"Poe," he said, gentle. "There's no going home from this ship. You know that."

"Kriffing hell, Ben, let a guy daydream in his last moments, alright?"

"Even imminent death apparently can't knock the optimism out of you," Ben sighed. "Okay. If I agree to go back with you, what happens next?"

Poe set his jaw and let the scenes play out in front of his eyes, "You come with me to the base. Everyone freaks out because they don't recognize you, but the general, General Leia, she knows who you are. That's how you avoid getting killed."

Next to him, he felt Ben nod, and taking his silence as a cue, Poe continued weaving his story.

"You apologize. You apologize to Finn for hurting him so badly. You apologize to Rey for trying to kill her. You apologize to your mother and Chewbacca and everyone else for killing Han. Nobody accepts your apologies at first. Nobody trusts you, nobody but me. But I'm the best pilot in the Resistance, and if I tell people that Ben isn't going to kill any more people, maybe they start to believe me."

"This is stretching it, even for a daydream," Ben muttered.

"Shut up, Ben, I'm talking. Anyways, eventually, everybody comes 'round to what I've been saying-"

Ben's head sank against Poe's shoulder, and Poe glanced over in surprise. The other man's eyelids were fluttering, fighting to stay open; a warning light blinked on the oxygen canister in his lap. Poe felt his eyes start to water.

"I'm, I'm the best pilot in the Resistance, you know," he went on, choking the words out around the pain in his chest somehow, "so everyone pays attention to what I have to say. And if I tell them, hey, this guy used to be my closest friend and he, he's done some terrible things in the past, and used to hang out with some of the nastiest people..." Poe took a deep breath, "But he jettisoned them from his life, these assholes that were lying to him and using him, and he saved my life and helped me... and, and he can't undo what he's done, but he'll do anything, _anything_  he can to help make the galaxy a better place for the rest of his life..."

The warning light on Poe's oxygen canister blinked on. Against his shoulder, Ben stirred.

"And," Poe went on, heedless. "And eventually, everyone understands. And things get better." The air in the room seemed to be getting thin, and although he took a deep breath after running his mouth, Poe felt light-headed.

"Vague ending, Poe," Ben mumbled from against his shoulder.

"Not done," Poe interrupted, drawing in as much breath as he could. "I get to spend more time with my oldest friend. Maybe get to be proper friends again. Maybe finally teach him how to fly a ship on his kriffing own. And he gets a nice new hand." Mutely, Ben raised his left arm and Poe seized his hand as tightly as he could. "He-" Poe fought against the bone-deep exhaustion diffusing through his mind, "he learns to tell people about his problems, instead of bottling them up and- and trying to fight them on his own, because, because there have always been people that love him-"

The last thing Poe saw before his eyes slid shut was a flash of green on the control console: the blinking of the emergency beacon.

His thoughts went still, and silence and darkness overtook him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A Mawgax is a herbivorous animal from Yavin 4. Starships are more complicated than anyone realized.


	3. Orbital Period

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The planet returns from the cold reaches of space and heads once more towards the heat and light of the star.

Poe woke up in warmth.

Slowly, haltingly, he opened his eyes, and as his head throbbed at the effort, his vision began to clear: he lay in a medbay bed, tubes in each of his arms. The white sheets over him were dusted in sunlight, BB-8 rested charging and silent next to a medical stand, and in a chair nearby, General Leia sat, flipping through a holocomm. Poe recognized the images: a massive waterfall throwing off beautiful clouds of spray, a palace with graceful towers soaring to sweep the sky. Alderaan.

"Pretty cool, right?" Poe managed, and his voice came out like gravel. Leia turned to him in surprise, and then her tired face broke into a smile.

"It certainly is," she answered, turning off the holocomm and tucking it into a pocket of her vest. "How are you feeling?"

"Alive," Poe answered, "so that's good."

Leia raised an eyebrow at him and said, "I recall telling you to get out of there if anything at all went wrong."

"I tried," Poe spoke, "but... look, it's a really long story--" He had just caught sight of the bed next to his: empty. All the other beds in the medbay were empty.

"Where's Ben?"

Leia blinked, then turned away, and Poe felt his breath failing, _no, no, no, it's not possible, not after how hard we worked, it's not, Ben's not_ -

When Leia turned back to him she had tears in her eyes, but her expression looked calm.

"Ben's alive." As Poe let out an exhale, relieved, Leia continued, "I didn't think it wise to keep him here. There's another location nearby under our control, and he's recovering there."

"Can I go see him?" Poe blurted out.

"Poe," Leia reminded, her voice gentle but firm, "you're badly dehydrated, badly exhausted, and apparently somewhat malnourished. You need your rest."

"I know that," Poe groused, and then, realizing he was being petulant, he added, "General, ma'am. But... I want to make sure he's alright."

"I can have someone take you there when you're back on your feet," Leia said, and Poe relaxed and sank back down onto his pillow, satisfied. "I must say," he heard the general speak, "this is an... unexpected change in your outlook towards... towards him." Poe sensed the worry in her voice. There was something she didn't understand, and then Leia asked, "He didn't _do_  anything to you, did he? Like he did... last time?"

Ah. That explained it all.

"No," Poe shook his head gently, feeling sleep dragging him back under. "He helped save my life."

 

* * *

 

 

The other location General Leia had mentioned turned out to be the lush moon orbiting the planet that the Resistance had constructed their new base on.  As soon as Poe had proven that he could walk unaided and had recovered from his ordeal on the nameless world he'd been trapped on, he hopped in his old familiar X-wing, Black One, and tried to clear himself for a flight to the moon.

Unfortunately, medical hadn't cleared him for flying yet - only walking.  Poe ended up bribing Jess Pava for a lift instead.

The moon came as a bit of a shock to Poe's system.  Used to seeing an empty expanse of dust and ice or the sterile walls of his medbay room, the explosion of color and life momentarily dazzled him.  Gnarled trees wove up towards a cloudy sky, their leaves whispering in a cool breeze that carried on it the scent of hundreds of different multicolored flowers, a carpet of which stretched out over the fields in all directions.  Soft grasses brushed up from the earth, bushes hung heavy with native fruit, and once in a while, Poe heard the sharp call of a bird.

It was a nice place, he decided.

As Jess stood guard with the ship, Poe set off.  The directions Leia had given him led him from the makeshift landing pad up a small dirt path that wound over a few sets of hills towards a modern construction that stood out incongruously against the thriving natural landscape.  It had curved metal walls and large windows and had been wedged carefully into a thick grove of trees.  Two security droids stood sentinel at the entrance, and Poe nodded a hello to them before knocking on the door.

A medi-droid answered it.

< _Hello,_ > she greeted in a cool voice.  < _Please state your name and rank._ >

"Commander Poe Dameron," he introduced himself.  "I'm here to see Ben."

< _Access granted,_ > the droid replied.  < _Please follow me._ >  The interior of the house was almost clinically tidy.  As Leia had explained it, it was a new construction.  The planet had been mainly used for farming purposes, and no intelligent species had established a home on it, so they'd had to build something there from scratch.  Poe wasn't entirely sure he liked the solution the Resistance had devised for their latest... well, prisoner.  But it was preferable to a jail cell.  Certainly preferable to execution.

In the bedroom at the back of the house, Ben lay stretched out under white sheets, still hooked up to the tubes and monitors Poe had himself so recently shrugged off.  He looked healthier, less starved, better rested, although seeing him all in white after getting used to his normal black garb made Poe's eyes feel uncomfortable.  Ben had been lying still but he was visibly awake, and when he spied Poe, the look in his eyes turned intense and he made to stand up from the bed.

< _You must rest,_ > the medi-droid chastised, hurrying over, and to Poe's surprise, Ben obeyed, albeit reluctantly.

"You made it," he greeted, his voice hoarse.

"We made it," Poe corrected.  "BB-8 too.  I'd have brought him with me, but he's still fixated on zapping you awake.  I didn't tell him you'd already woken up.  Couldn't crush his little spirits."

"That wasn't kind," Ben observed.

"You say that now, but he's determined to zap you awake one way or another.  He'll seize his chance someday."

< _I must fetch the midday medications,_ > the medi-droid announced, interrupting.  < _I will be back shortly._ >  As she wheeled off, Poe followed her trail; beyond the door of the bedroom he could see a small kitchen and a living room.  Pretty cozy for a prison, really.

"So."  Poe glanced around and gestured to the walls, determined to keep an awkward silence from settling.  "You escaped being trapped on a planet to be... trapped on another planet.  I feel like I owe you an apology, honestly."

"You don't," Ben assured him, and he took advantage of the droid's absence to sit up properly and swing his long legs over the edge of the bed.  "You saved my life.  And... this is a far better place to be trapped."

"On that, we can agree."  Poe could see out the window of Ben's new bedroom, where the trees rustled in the wind.  He crossed the room and took a seat on the edge of the hospital bed, next to Ben.  A glance down, and he realized that Ben hadn't yet gotten a new hand.

"Soon."  Poe looked up in surprise and met the other man's gaze; Ben had followed his attention, and he repeated himself, "Soon.  Apparently I'm not strong enough yet.  It's why I'm stuck in bed."

"You  _did_ tell your mother about what you did on that planet, right?  The Force shields, rebuilding the ship-"

"I told her some of it," Ben answered, evasive.  "I figured she might trust you to give a better account."

Poe shook his head quickly.  He hadn't actually had any kind of conversation with the general yet, aside from answering a few very obvious questions - like how the deal had gone bad, how Ben had lost his hand, and how they'd managed to come by such a badly busted up freighter.

"You should tell her the whole story, Ben.  She'd want to know."

"When she's ready for it," Ben answered, and left it at that.  They talked a little bit about Ben's arrangements from that point on.  Luke Skywalker would be visiting eventually, Poe learned, and by the look on Ben's face, he knew Ben was dreading it.  But it would be like lancing a wound, Poe hoped.  Sometimes getting rid of a rotten past left painful scars, but Ben would hopefully still be alive at the end of it all.

He learned that once Ben got back up his feet (Ben insisted that the delay in that was entirely the overprotective droid's fault), he had effective free reign to explore the nearby area.  There were surveillance measures in place: security droids guarded the house, automated drone droids made regular flybys, and everything had been rigged to trigger an alarm should anyone try to destroy it and make a run for space.

But Ben didn't seem keen on leaving anytime soon.  Being a prisoner, for the time being, seemed more preferable to him than returning to the First Order and allowing Snoke back into his skull.  That made Poe glad, and he told the other man as much, and that was where the conversation tapered off.

For a while, the two of them sat still, wrapped in the afternoon quiet of the room.

"I heard," Ben spoke up, slowly at first, "that they found the ship by the emergency beacon.  Someone had enabled it on the planet's surface and keyed in a frequency, but had forgotten about it from that point on."

"Is that so," Poe mused, looking away.

"What kind of person activates an emergency beacon on the surface of a planet if they know the atmosphere blocks transmissions?"

"Beats me," Poe answered.  "An idiot?"

"An eternal optimist," Ben corrected, "apparently."  His expression softened, and his voice quieted, "Thank you, Poe."

Poe shook his head and set a hand gently on Ben's shoulder, "Hey.  It's fine."  He hesitated a moment, then reached over to pull Ben into a hug.  To his relief, Ben didn't resist: he chose instead to return the hug carefully with his uninjured arm.  "I'm glad you're alive.  I'm glad you're here."

The medi-droid chewed the both of them out when she returned with the promised medication and found them still hugging.

< _Commander Dameron, I will be forced to revoke your clearance-_ >

"You won't," Ben protested, a scowl on his face.  "He's the only other person to visit me-"

"Yeah, what he said," Poe added, but the droid had already started to open up a comm-link to the general.  "Stars, alright, fine, fine, I'll let him get his much-needed rest.  I hope whatever new hand you've got lined up for him can flip droids off."  He ran a hand through his hair with a sigh and turned his gaze back to Ben, who had gone slightly more morose and looked remarkably more like his old Kylo Ren self as such.

"I guess I'm getting kicked out," he muttered.  "Sorry.  I'll be back again later, the moon's not too hard to visit."

"It's not?" Ben asked.  "They haven't told me anything about this place."

Probably due to some kind of security protocol, Poe realized, but _kriff_ it, his old friend was alive and coming back to himself, slowly.  "The orbital period's roughly a standard day," he explained.  "By this time tomorrow, it'll be back in nearly the exact same place.  I can fly out, it won't be hard."

"Oh," Ben said, looking pleased.

"Maybe I can bring some holocomms with me, next time, in case you're bored," Poe suggested.  "Or something else to keep you occupied when you're stuck alone on a planet.  Some holovids or perhaps... a ship to fix?"

Poe had decided that the carefully horrified look on Ben's face was priceless - at least until the other man let out a short laugh, and Poe decided  _that_ was far more priceless instead.  He'd never, ever, speak a word of this to the other man, but perhaps losing his hand and being forced to cooperate for the sake of his own life had been the best thing that had happened to him in years.  There was no First Order here, no faceless black mask, no punishment for speaking a long-disused name.  There was only Ben, scarred but surviving, pulling himself out of the shadow of his crimes and torment and learning once more how to walk in the sun.  And Poe wouldn't have been able to bring him here if they both hadn't nearly lost their minds and died first.

"If you bring me a ship to fix," Ben threatened, with no real malice behind his words, "I'll put you in the ground."

"I'd like to see you try," Poe shot back.  "Can you even fire a blaster with your left hand?"  He felt eighteen years old again, lighter, happier.   _An eternal optimist_ , he thought, repeating Ben's words in his head as he turned and made to leave.   _Always a silver lining somewhere_.

"Poe."

Poe glanced back from the bedroom door.

"What you said on the ship, about talking to people.  About apologizing. About... everything you said on the ship."  Ben's face had gone solemn.  "Did you mean it?"

"I honestly don't remember all of what I said," Poe was forced to answer.  His mind had been running low on lucidity at that point, and he'd let his emotions seize the controls.  "But of course I meant it, buddy.  Every damn word."

Ben nodded, satisfied, and Poe waved a goodbye, letting himself out of the bedroom and out of the house with the slow pace of reluctance.  He'd been hoping for a longer meeting and a longer conversation, really.  He had so many questions to ask.

 _But_ , Poe reminded himself as he followed the path back to the landing pad,  _the moon wasn't far_.  He'd have his flying clearance back in no time, he felt certain of that, and he'd be able to make trips out as often as he liked.  Ben - prisoner that he was - wouldn't be learning to fly anytime soon, so Poe would have to make up the difference.

Jess was waiting impatiently by the ship when Poe returned, but upon seeing the look on his face, she rolled her eyes fondly.

"Do all of Black Squadron a solid, alright?" she griped, climbing into the cockpit and helping him up.  "The next time you fly into hell, don't come out singing."

"I make no promises," Poe shot back.  When the ship soared off up towards the stars, rather than keeping his eyes focused on the journey ahead, Poe turned instead to look behind him, watching the moon grow smaller, a jewel suspended vivid and shining in the dark and lonely expanse of space. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is! I wanted to end this on kind of a happy note, although I didn't get to play around as much with relationships as I wish I could have. I wanted to nudge things on a little further, but the plot - extensive as I made it - didn't really allow for it. On the bright side, I'm already thinking of writing a proper sequel to this, so hey!
> 
> Apparently, Poe's reaction to being trapped on a planet with his enemy is to dial the sass up to 11 and then break the knob off.
> 
> Let me know what you think! Questions, critiques, vague riddles - all is welcome! I hope you enjoyed it, and special shoutout to the person who prompted me to write this in the first place and sent me some seriously amazing ideas. I ended up pulling the entire plot from a combination of two prompts: one that I decided I definitely wanted to write and one that had a phrase it it that made me laugh for five straight minutes.


End file.
